Practical Knowledge Commons: A Study of the Maker Community in Delft

This research explores how practical knowledge commons in makerspaces are developed, challenged, and sustained. Adopting the Governing Knowledge Commons framework, the study focuses on Makerspace Delft, a community of makers and hobbyists in Delft, the Netherlands. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews (N = 15), triangulated with six months of weekly participant observation. The results show that practical knowledge is primarily embodied in people and transmitted through practice rather than stored in objects or facilities. Accordingly, the core facilities of the resource system are not repositories or archives but structured opportunities for real-time interaction, such as supervisor shifts, training sessions, and collaborative projects. The case reveals a nested social dilemma. At the first level, members are willing to share knowledge but face a public good problem in participation: the private costs of engaging in collective activities are immediate, while the benefits are diffuse and delayed. At the second level, the very infrastructures that could lower participation costs — projects, communication channels, and governance structures — are themselves shared goods requiring costly provision. Drawing on the joint production framework, the study argues that the culture of informality characterising the community is itself a social infrastructure, jointly produced through everyday practice and resistant to transformation because the private costs of institutional entrepreneurship exceed the individually capturable benefits. The study contributes to the knowledge commons literature by offering a first application of the GKC framework to a makerspace, to the makerspace scholarship by introducing an institutional analysis focused on collective action, and to knowledge management studies by exploring community-based, decentralised modes of practical knowledge governance.