Commoning and common information systems for social equity and ecological sustainability

Ecological sustainability and social equity are among the United Nations' Millennium Development. Goals - but, unfortunately, as the years pass, they are still far from being reached. But concern about these issues has made its way to industry and the IS community. IS play a central ro le in companies as they are cross - functional and have a strategic role in our current information society. We argue that it is our responsibility, as IS scholars, to dedicate some of our research efforts toward environmental sustainability and to social eq uity, and that our teaching, our journals and our associations should also address these two objectives. This article proposes Commoning and Common Information Systems as a possible tentative to facilitate the inclusion of both ecological sustainability an d social equity concerns within the IS discipline. We advance this new concept of Common Information Systems, which are IS where (1) the surrounding society is considered a human community, (2) the material and energy input into the IS are seen as common g oods, and the material and energy leaving the IS are viewed as common bads, (3) commoning (i.e. sharing) information output is preferred