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

Practical Knowledge: Basic Definitional Aspects and Shared Practices within Makerspaces

Borrowing from practice theory, practical knowledge originates in shared practices through participation and engagement with other individuals in the performance of an activity (Geiger, 2009; Schatzki, 2005). Although we perceive the world through our bodies, we create its meaning through interaction with other bodies and the world itself (Schatzki, 2005). Given that practical knowledge comes from participation in a specific activity, it is also highly contextual (Venkitachalam & Busch, 2012, Polanyi, 1966/2009). This context is then constructed by the physical and social world. The formation of practical knowledge thus needs to be understood as “mediated both by interactions between people and by arrangements in the world…knowledge is no longer even the property of individuals, but instead a feature of groups, together with their material setups.” (Schatzki, 2005, pp. 20–21).

Activity theory calls the social context of learning a “social scaffolding” (Bevan et al., 2015, p. 110), an environment where individuals intentionally and unintentionally inspire and support one another (Bevan et al., 2015). In the context of makerspaces, the social aspect of learning is not only a theoretical predisposition to knowledge creation and acquisition, but it is cited as one of the most significant advantages of shared workshops (Sheridan et al., 2014; Bean et al., 2015; Mersand, 2021).

The combination of different skills and approaches found in maker spaces promotes innovation and allows for multiple vantage points or sources of inspiration for designing or problem-solving. Makerspaces merge the more structured practice environments (workshops, trainings) and informal individual or community activities. Thanks to such amalgamation of approaches, makerspaces are potent to enable systematic development of practical knowledge, but, at the same time, allow for application and reconfiguration of the knowledge through the informal means of shared community practices, becoming communities of practice (Sheridan et al., 2014). Within communities of practice acquiring knowledge is constant through social activities instead of being left only to dedicated learning (Sheridan et al., 2014; Wenger, 2011). Such social activities may be very mundane or microscopic: asking someone for help, a short discussion about a possible solution, or just mere observation. They are the place of informal social scaffolding.

Practical Knowledge Commons Resource System

Practical knowledge resides in people and is constructed by people through their participation in shared practices. Yet, individuals do not necessarily have all the incentives to participate in a knowledge provision process, even if it benefits all.

First, participation costs are immediate, while the benefits of the generated knowledge may come much later (Van Lange et al., 2013). Second, if the community’s accumulated knowledge is accessible without our participation, the motivation to contribute decreases further, since we can benefit from the shared knowledge without any cost, creating a social dilemma (Hess & Ostrom, 2007).

However, as Kealey and Ricketts (2021) argue, knowledge cannot be accessed by anyone freely due to its tacit nature. In their study of scientific knowledge, they contend that access to scientific knowledge is not open for all, as in the case of pure public goods, but only for those who are knowledgeable enough to understand or use the particular scientific finding. When the scientific knowledge pool reaches a certain volume, the benefits for the individual contributor surpass the costs of the contribution, changing the payoff structure of the public goods game into a pure cooperation game. Nevertheless, before reaching such a threshold, the public goods social dilemma pertains, as the immediate private benefits will be lower than the private costs for the contributors. The challenge for governing contribution goods is therefore incentivising contribution until the threshold is reached (Kealey and Ricketts, 2021).

As Madison et al. argue (2019, p.12), “shared infrastructure appears to be often central to the success of knowledge commons institutions”. Infrastructural resources serve as inputs into the production of knowledge goods. Given their relative nonrivalry and positive externalities, infrastructural resources are subject to social dilemmas similar to the example of knowledge resources above. Infrastructures don’t have to be roads or railways, but also social constructs such as governance structure, also facing public good social dilemma and a collective action problem: “how to continually generate contributions to coproduce the common pool of knowledge governance and to maintain it over time such that the depletion rate of governance does not systematically exceed the replacement rate of governance” (Lopez, 2021, p.92). The solutions to social dilemmas of shared resource production – common governance structure and communication channels facilitating collective action – are themselves subject to cooperation challenges, called second-order social dilemmas (Ostrom, 2015). Similarly to the scientific knowledge pool, the payoffs for contributing to the construction or maintenance of the governance structure differ with the state of the structure. That brings back the challenge of contribution goods in providing incentives for contribution in the initial stage to offset the immediate private cost-benefit imbalance (Lopez, 2021). Unlike the knowledge pool itself, supporting infrastructures may go unnoticed even when their private benefits surpass the private costs, since ‘we don’t pay much attention to infrastructure resources, because they are conveniently obscure part of the background’ (Frischmann, 2012, p. ix). The public good social dilemma may prevail, even though the real private benefits surpass the private costs.

Infrastructures are not static backdrops to collective action but are produced and transformed through the practices they sustain. Institutional and legal infrastructures evolve endogenously: rules and interpretations are jointly shaped by the interactions they enable and constrain (Dekker & Kuchař, 2024). Conventions exemplify this dynamic as shared cognitive infrastructures that stabilize cooperation while delimiting understanding yet can shift when actors recognize unrealized potentials (Choi, 2021, Dalla Chiesa, 2021). In our makerspace case, we therefore expect looping dynamics, beneficial or detrimental, between the practical knowledge pool and its communication and governance infrastructure.

Governing Knowledge Commons Framework

We adopt the Governing Knowledge Commons framework (GKC, Figure 1) in two ways: first, as a guiding tool for operationalization and data collection, and, second, as a vantage point for analysis of the data.

Figure 1

The GKC framework views knowledge commons as governance arrangements established by a community for the institutionalized sharing and management of knowledge resources through formal and informal rules (Frischmann et al., 2014; McGinnis, 2011).

The focal point of the GKC framework is the action arena, where individual actors interact in specific situations. The action arena is the physical and metaphorical place where individual participants make decisions based on the physical properties, community characteristics, and rules that construct the situation. Results of those decisions – outcomes of particular arenas are then aggregated in patterns of interactions and affect the contextual variables and thus change parts or the entirety of the resource system (Frischmann et al., 2014).

Interactions between participants are defined by participants’ positions, available actions, information, potential outcomes, degrees of control, and associated costs and benefits (Figure 2).

Figure 2

We focus on the rules-in-use category of the GKC framework to analyse the institutional arrangements of the practical knowledge commons. The rules-in-use contain the particular shared constructed rules. Seven broad categories of rules follow the structure of the action situation. These are position, boundary, aggregation, information, payoff, choice, and scope rules (Figure 3, Crawford & Ostrom, 2005).

Figure 3

We adopt Cole’s (2017) distinction between rules-in-form (formally enacted regulations) and rules-in-use (the agreed-upon prescriptions that actually guide behaviour), since in makers’ communities formal and working rules are expected to diverge with consequences for coordination.

There are three primary levels of action arenas, each with distinct rules-in-use and rules-in-form: operational, collective-choice, and constitutional (Figure 4, Ostrom, 2005). The operational level concerns direct interactions between actors and the resource system and is governed by rules created at the collective-choice level. The constitutional level defines who can participate in collective-choice processes and thus who is entitled to make operational rules. Resource characteristics and community composition may differ across these levels (Ostrom, 2005; Ostrom & Hess, 2007).

Figure 4

Beyond vertical linkages across levels, action situations may also be horizontally connected within the same level. This is captured by the concept of a network of adjacent action situations (McGinnis, 2011), which extends the operational–collective–constitutional axis. Two action situations are adjacent when outcomes in one influence the rules governing another. As a result, key features of a focal action situation—such as actors, available actions, or evaluative criteria—may be shaped by processes occurring elsewhere. This perspective is particularly useful for maker communities, where actors engage in multiple, interrelated activities that affect the practical knowledge pool without being explicitly oriented toward intentional knowledge production, reflecting communities of practice and informal social scaffolding.

Institutional Design Principles for Sustainable and Resilient Commons

Based on an extensive analysis of natural commons that successfully overcame social dilemmas, Ostrom synthesized a wide variety of specific institutional rules into a set of general design principles that “appear to synthesise core factors that affect the probability of long-term survival of an institution developed by the users of a resource” (Ostrom, 2010, p. 653). The principles presented in Figure 5 reflect the modification proposed by Cox, Arnold, and Tomás (2010), who distinguish between social and ecological conditions for selected principles.

Figure 5

Some of these principles may be less directly applicable to knowledge commons and, in particular, to makerspaces. As Hess and Ostrom note, the design principles are “helpful as a possible place to start an investigation,” while their applicability to complex systems such as knowledge commons remains an open empirical question (Hess & Ostrom, 2007, p. 7). Existing studies nevertheless suggest meaningful parallels.

Resource Characteristics

Across the interviews, shared knowledge is understood as a collectively maintained, practice-based resource that enables participants to navigate tasks and risks without relying on formal instructions, instead drawing on mutual sense-making, informal explanation, and accumulated experience. One interviewee explains that deciding whether to inquire with supervisors, the tech team, or a general channel “is just something common sense” (Interviewee 13, membership length (ML) < 1 year). Rather than relying on formal rules, they describe a socially distributed sense of “what to do” regarding internal channels and responsibilities.

Shared knowledge also emerges through participation in managerial and organizational practice, where members exchange experience about making things but also about running the space; as one Board member notes, “Figuring out as we go and helping each other.” (Int. 10, ML < 1 year). This is closely linked to safety practices, as experienced members instruct newcomers on equipment use and hazards: “I basically just tell them about soldering stations and trying to eliminate some fire hazards like that” (Int. 4, ML > 1 year).

Members described that practical knowledge is primarily embodied in people and transmitted through practice rather than stored in objects or facilities. When asked about learning tool operation from manuals, one maker stated: “I think specifically for making things in a shop, that [youtube tutorials] wouldn’t work for me because I think a lot of it is the safety concern of physically knowing how the machine works and what sounds mean, what or how to say something if something goes wrong.” (Int. 8, ML < 1 year). Another interviewee emphasized learning through observation of experienced members: “I was afraid with the power tool, so I would be like: Guys, can you do it for me? And then someone would do it and I would see repeatedly how it’s done. And then I became confident.“ (Int. 12, ML > 1 year).

From an analytical perspective, the primary artifacts of practical knowledge are people themselves. 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 projects, each constituting an Action Arena for knowledge sharing through direct interaction.

Attributes of the Community

The MSD community is characterized by strong social cohesion and intrinsic motivation, high trust, and significant heterogeneity in skills, with informal leadership playing a crucial role in enabling coordination and effective knowledge sharing within an inclusive setting. It consists of students and recent graduates and has grown steadily to approximately 40 supervisors and over 15 paying members. Interviewees consistently described their motivation for joining as extending beyond access to tools to include belonging to a community of like-minded makers. As one participant noted: “I joined mostly because of the community. I was missing an engaging environment at my job and wanted to surround myself with people who are passionate about something” (Int. 6, ML > 1 year). Similarly, incentives for participation include learning new skills and contributing to the community or the space.

Levels of technical proficiency vary widely, ranging from highly experienced members to complete beginners. This heterogeneity creates challenges for knowledge sharing, as it can be difficult to identify members with the relevant expertise for specific practices. At the same time, restricting access based on experience would contradict MSD’s inclusive mission to accommodate a wide range of makers from Delft.

Within the practical knowledge resource system, supervisors and paying members constitute the primary users. Knowledge provision is enabled by team members, the Board, and project leaders, who manage facilities, training, projects, and communication channels. The Board acts as the main policymaker, governing the space both formally and informally through decisions on rules, investments, and activities, while external partners (mainly TU Delft) provide financial and material support.

All interviewees reported the presence of informal leaders within the community. Experienced members, particularly those in the Tech Team, are recognised for their competence and reliability, often acting as consultants and project drivers.

Rules-in-use: Operational Level

Given the size of the MSD community, there are effectively two tiers of action arenas: the operational level, covering most activities, and a combined collective-choice and constitutional level, where formal policymaking occurs through the Board.

The main facilities providing access to rules-in-form are Notion, Slack, and Google Drive, where operational rules are primarily documented. Notion is the dominant repository, containing the Supervision Manual, machine guidelines, and behavioural norms. However, it is not centrally moderated or systematically maintained. Although some basic structure exists, responsibility for updating content is informally delegated to team leaders, without clear expectations. When asked where to find specific rules, most interviewees responded with variations of “somewhere on Notion”, with one comparing the experience to a mining operation: “(…) Notion is like a huge mine where nobody actually knows what is what.” (Int. 2, ML > 1 year).

Most positions within MSD are informal, and more than half were not recognised by at least one interviewee. This lack of clarity complicates orientation within the community, particularly for newcomers seeking guidance or participation in projects.

At the operational level, the supervisor role is the most prominent. Boundary rules are minimal: aside from required safety training, any adult contacting the community can become a supervisor. Interviewees noted that supervisors often “disappear” without notice. Beyond shift-related duties, no further participation in teams, projects, or events is required, and no rewards are attached to supervisory work. Entry rules for team or project leadership are similarly undefined.

The second key operational position is that of paying member. Paying members subscribe to MSD services via a monthly fee, can use facilities during reserved time slots, but are not required to participate in community activities.

Beyond these formal roles, several informal positions exist – team members and leaders, project participants, past Board members, and tool donors – whose recognition and responsibilities vary across the community.

Rules governing projects are sparse. There is no formal process for initiating projects, appointing leaders, or defining scope. Participation is fluid, with members joining or leaving without notice, and projects often lacking clear objectives or timelines. Team and project participation typically adds informal responsibilities to the supervisor role, with the main distinction being access to dedicated Slack channels.

Aggregation rules at the operational level are largely based on consensus, particularly within teams and projects. Although leaders exist, interviewees did not report the exercise of formal authority. Conflicts are rare and resolved informally; there are no formal conflict-resolution mechanisms.

Monitoring and enforcement of operational rules are minimal. Supervisors are not monitored for compliance with the Supervision Manual, resulting in heterogeneous interpretations of responsibilities. While some supervisors actively monitor machine use, others adopt a more passive approach. High levels of trust reduce expectations of opportunistic behaviour but also limit enforcement capacity. As one Board member explained: “We found that in general this stuff isn’t abused. It also takes a while to maintain. And the utility of it is also quite limited because it’s not like everyone checks.” (Int. 7, ML > 1 year). Reluctance to monitor or sanction others is reinforced by close personal ties and the desire to maintain a friendly atmosphere: “You don’t want to be like the boo man that everybody just knows because he tells you to stop, to do something. So can understand how that’s challenging from a personal standpoint” (Int. 4, ML > 1 year).

Rules-in-Use: Collective-choice and Constitutional Level

Formal policymaking authority in MSD rests with the Board, composed of current Board members and occasionally advised by former ones. Board members share many rules with supervisors, including volunteer status and responsibility for space maintenance and safety, but are also subject to specific exceptions. The Board is renewed annually, reflecting the student origins of the organisation. New Board members are selected by the current Board from internal or external applicants, following interviews but without formal admission criteria. As one former Board member recalled: “They’re currently not elected, but (…) interviewed by the last Board and then the past Board and the new Board just discuss until they’re happy with the roles that they’ve come up with. So the roles are fluid.” (Int. 3, ML > 1 year).

Interviewees explained the absence of stricter selection rules by pointing to chronic difficulties in recruiting Board candidates. The Board consists of team managers and a Board Leader, who oversees administration, finances, and legal obligations.

Choice rules are partially formalised: Board responsibilities are listed on the MSD website, and members are expected to attend weekly meetings and emergency sessions. However, absences are handled informally, and responsibilities often shift between Boards. Decision-making occurs by consensus, despite notary documents stipulating majority voting. As one Board member noted: “We could always come to a solution. And for the smaller stuff, you know, we would let John, the team manager, to decide. But nothing was ever so complex where we were so much in disagreement that we had to” (Int. 6, ML > 1 year).

Action Arenas

Based on the data, we conceptualise action arenas as sites where community members share practical knowledge through training, collaborative practice, or impromptu communication. They are supervisor shifts, training sessions, projects, and informal “hanging around” the space.

Supervisor shifts are typically four-hour time slots during which two supervisors ensure the space is open, provide assistance, perform basic maintenance, and intervene in cases of unsafe tool use. Each supervisor holds at least one shift per week. Knowledge sharing during shifts often occurs informally, as one interviewee explained: “I generally share the shift with the same supervisor every time, when we’ve built up this regime that we always talk about our projects and the best way to do this and that.” (Int. 13, ML < 1 year).

Interviewees reported several ongoing and past projects, including building a 3D scanner, refurbishing the kitchen, and participating in a local Makerfaire. However, many noted persistent difficulties in completing projects, often due to overambitious planning: “Because we always get excited and we always want to do too much and then three months later, you’ll only tick like two of the ten boxes and suddenly you have eight more things to do” (Int. 5, ML > 1 year). Of 11 projects mentioned, only four were completed within planned timelines, typically by small groups of highly motivated members. Others stalled or remained incomplete for extended periods. Interviewees linked these outcomes to limited project scaffolding, absence of scope rules, and lack of payoff rules, leaving participation dependent on intrinsic motivation and the presence of a project “driver”.

Knowledge also spreads through simply being present in the space:

Patterns of Interaction

In MSD, personal relationships and informal structures function as the primary infrastructure of the community. Practical knowledge is embedded in recognisable individuals, and access to it depends on opportunities for interpersonal interaction- shared shifts, trainings, projects, and presence in the space – rather than on manuals or repositories. Governance similarly relies on interpersonal familiarity and ad hoc negotiation: roles are loosely defined, often unclear to newcomers, and filled based on availability and perceived fit rather than formal procedures. Projects depend on a recognised “driver” whose legitimacy derives from reputation and prior contributions rather than formal authority. Both supervisors and Board members describe “common sense” and mutual trust as sufficient substitutes for detailed rules, monitoring, and sanctions. The small and socially cohesive character of the community discourages confrontational oversight, as it would risk damaging friendly relations. As a result, access to knowledge, opportunities, and decision-making is mediated by social proximity and comfort in approaching others, with informal judgement performing most coordination work.

The most prominent tension in MSD concerns the gap between abundant willingness to share knowledge and limited participation in the collective activities through which such sharing occurs. When participation is left to intrinsic motivation alone, incentives for engaging in projects are often insufficient to sustain moderate or high participation levels. Interviewees cited several reasons for limited engagement. The most frequently mentioned was lack of time, as most supervisors are students balancing academic commitments. Second, the absence of active project management makes it unclear which projects are ongoing or worth investing in, increasing the risk of wasted effort. Third, some interviewees indicated that, as volunteers, they prefer projects that are personally interesting rather than those primarily benefiting the community. This reflects a public good dilemma, in which socially optimal behaviour (project participation) is outweighed by immediate private benefits (time allocation to other activities). At the same time, several interviewees expressed a strong willingness to contribute to the community, constrained mainly by time and information. These patterns suggest that the gap between willingness and participation is shaped not by individual attitudes but by the absence of operational rules structuring engagement.

Information scarcity also produces a steep learning curve for newcomers. Although expertise is widely available, identifying knowledgeable members is difficult. As one participant explained: “You can ask for help, but you have to figure out who to ask if you wanna learn a new skill. Probably you have to figure it out on your own, and if you’re lucky, ask around, you will find the person who can help you or is willing to help. But it’s not all laid out for you.” (Int. 6, ML > 1 year).

Consequently, despite abundant learning potential—accessible space, tools, and expertise—entry into the learning process is hindered by the lack of infrastructures mediating knowledge transfer.

Network of Adjacent Action Situations: the Case of MSD

The action situations in MSD form an interconnected configuration in which outcomes from one arena regularly shape the rules that govern others (Figure 7).

Figure 7

As the only formal governing body, the Board is the sole arena that can create or modify rules-in-form for all other situations: it can decide who may become a supervisor or Board member and what formal responsibilities these positions carry. However, many practically relevant prescriptions remain as rules-in-use that never crystallise into written procedures. Projects are a clear example: initiating a project requires at least some acknowledgement from the Board, yet there is no codified process for establishing a project, appointing a leader, allocating funds, or setting timelines. Decisions about communication platforms follow a similar pattern, with the shift from Slack to Discord triggered by a few non-committal discussions and effectively settled once one Board member had moved the community far enough along that reversal became socially difficult. Dispute resolution mostly occurs within projects or through everyday interaction in the space, and only afterwards feeds back into collective choice. Monitoring constitutes, at best, a latent action arena (hence the semi-transparent visualisation): sporadic checks during supervision shifts focus on safe tool use rather than on compliance with knowledge-sharing rules. Safety rules similarly emerge from operational practice when experienced makers define acceptable procedures around particular machines and then spread these standards through trainings and online channels, often without any formal ratification. Across these linkages, cross-arena influence is largely carried by “common sense” judgements and interpersonal negotiations, which collectively generate and adjust the working rules that actually guide behaviour, whether or not they ever appear as formal prescriptions. This means that the provision and maintenance of working rules — the infrastructure that coordinates all three operational arenas — depends on the same informal, uncoordinated processes it is supposed to govern, creating a circularity that the Discussion examines as a nested social dilemma.