Explore the glossary to gain a deeper understanding of the concepts, terms, and ideas that shape the GLAMMONS project. From key methodologies to emerging practices, this section offers clear and accessible explanations to support your journey through the project’s themes, language, and vision.
GLAMMONS (or Commons-oriented GLAMs)
This term refers to a bottom-up process where a group of individuals comes together to steward tangible and intangible cultural and knowledge resources within GLAM institutions. Unlike traditional top-down institutions, GLAMMONS are small, community-run organizations built on collective ownership and horizontal governance. They are reimagined as shared spaces where diverse communities no longer act merely as “audiences” but as active participants who co-create meaning, shape narratives, and manage resources collaboratively. The framework is defined by three interconnected pillars: Governance (horizontal and inclusive), Autonomy (limited dependency on state/market actors), and Accessibility (sharing outputs through a commoning ethos).
Cultural Commons
These are evolving and cumulative social systems where various groups negotiate the valuation, creation, and use of diverse cultural resources. This concept encompasses shared knowledge, symbolic meanings, and living heritage that is transmitted and reinterpreted within communities. Cultural commons challenge traditional hierarchies in the art world by viewing artistic practices as common-pool resources. They act as a defense against the commodification of culture, ensuring that creative expression remains a public good rooted in community care and social solidarity.
Collaborative Management
This governance strategy shares decision-making authority and responsibility among all participants who have an interest in a resource. A central tenet is the centrality of Space, which is treated as a “generative force” that shapes community interactions and fosters new cultural practice. It rejects traditional hierarchical models in favor of a structure that is adaptive, inclusive, and aligned with a commons-based ethos. It also integrates mechanisms to recognize non-monetary contributions as core capital necessary for institutional sustainability.
Sweat Equity
Sweat equity refers to the non-monetary investment contributed to a GLAM through unpaid labour, time, creativity, and expertise. Within GLAMMONS, this is recognized as core capital, equal in value to financial or institutional investment. It acts as a primary source of “funding” through in-kind contributions that sustain the organization when financial resources are limited. Beyond utility, sweat equity builds social capital, fostering trust, shared purpose, and a sense of collective authorship among contributors.
Co-Leadership
A leadership style where responsibility, authority, and accountability are shared between two or more individuals. In GLAMMONS, co-leadership acknowledges that the institutional space is dynamic and interactive, requiring a model that nurtures shared leadership practices and empowers diverse voices. It prioritizes the empowerment of volunteers and community members, moving away from hierarchical “expert-led” models toward resilient structures capable of adapting to the evolving needs of a cultural commons.
Diverse/Community Economies
This economic framework values impact beyond traditional financial growth by recognizing non-monetized contributions like reciprocal exchanges and volunteer labour. It seeks to challenge dominant market narratives by proposing alternative models where communities generate mutual wealth through collective production. This approach acknowledges that the “reproduction” of GLAMMONS relies on a mix of co-funding, voluntary contributions, and Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) principles.
Heterarchy
Heterarchy describes a governance structure that allows for multiple roles and relationships of power and authority to coexist among participants, rather than a single top-down chain of command. In the context of GLAMMONS, a heterarchical approach enables a more fluid distribution of responsibility, where decision-making is shared and authority can shift based on the specific needs of a project or the expertise of the “commoners” involved. This model is designed to support consent-based decision-making and prevent the accumulation of power by any single individual or group.
Symbolic and Social Boundaries
These terms refer to the conceptual and social distinctions used by groups to define who belongs to a community of memory and who is excluded. Symbolic boundaries are the conceptual categorisations that “commoners” use to create mutual awareness and identity, while social boundaries are the more formalised patterns of association. For GLAM professionals, managing these boundaries is critical to ensuring accessibility and permeability, allowing newcomers to join the commons without being forced into rigid, pre-existing roles.
Values-based Approach (VbA)
The VbA is a methodology used to assess the impact of GLAMs based on social, cultural, and societal values rather than traditional financial metrics alone. It serves as a baseline for understanding how user and surrounding communities “valuate” a cultural institution. This approach is central to the Quality Evaluator+ (QE+) service, which encourages GLAMMONS to report on their cultural embeddedness and the effectiveness of their interventions in fostering community resilience.
Collective Stewardship
This term describes a shift where GLAMs are reimagined as shared spaces for participatory knowledge production. In this model, institutions are no longer seen as “custodians” acting on behalf of the public, but as platforms where diverse stakeholders—including researchers, activists, and local residents—collaboratively manage resources and narratives. Collective stewardship ensures that cultural production is not a neutral act but one shaped by horizontal governance and shared responsibility for the institution’s long-term viability.
Co-Creation
Co-creation is the collective act of making—whether it be an artwork, a piece of knowledge, or a strategy—where all contributors participate equally in shaping and bringing an idea into being. It moves beyond mere public involvement to a model where professionals and communities co-set project goals and work together throughout implementation. This process is grounded in mutual trust and allows initial visions to evolve through collaborative engagement.
Shared Making
Shared making is a practice focusing on the “do it together” aspect of commoning, where the emphasis is on the collective creation of exhibitions, ecomuseums, or cultural spaces. Through shared making, the community provides the necessary labour, skills, and tools to transform physical or symbolic spaces into venues for wider engagement.
Prosumption
The concept of prosumption describes a role where community members act as “prosumers”—simultaneously producing and consuming cultural goods. In this practice, artworks and cultural content originate from the community’s social needs and take form through their active interaction with artists and professionals.
Collaborative Knowledge Production
This refers to GLAMs acting as potential infrastructures where knowledge is not merely gathered by experts but actively produced through dialogue with communities. It treats individual skills and community experience as common-pool resources that are shared and redistributed through open-access repositories and cloud-based infrastructures.
Commoning
Often used as a verb to highlight activity, commoning is the ongoing social praxis of collectively managing resources to meet shared goals and needs. It emphasizes that a “commons” is not just a static resource but a dynamic system that can only be governed through active social relationships, traditions, and rituals. In the GLAM context, commoning involves “learning together how to co-create” and upholding shared values to sustain a peer-governed system. It is a process of (re)production where the community and the resource are mutually constitutive.
Community of Commoners
A diverse grouping of professionals, individuals, and interest groups—including directors, curators, volunteers, and users—whose engagement forms the foundation of the GLAMMONS. Members of this community are not merely managers or stakeholders of an independent asset; they are co-creators whose interactions shape both the cultural resource and their own sense of community. This interdependence requires governance models that accommodate the fluid nature of these relationships, moving away from viewing stakeholders as separate actors from the institution.
Agonistic Cultural Governance (or Agonistic Spaces)
Drawing from Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonism, this framework reimagines conflict as a fundamental and constructive element of governance rather than a disruption to be minimized. It encourages institutions to create “agonistic cultural spaces” where different perspectives can be openly contested and integrated into the decision-making process. This approach views conflict as a vital source of creativity and innovation, fostering a dynamic environment where diverse voices actively shape the institution’s impact and direction.
New Commons
This term reflects a shift in the scope of commons from Elinor Ostrom’s initial focus on natural common-pool resources (like forests or water) to intellectual, digital, and cultural resources. These “new commons” are characterized by collaborative stewardship in the arts and cultural sector, often emerging in response to challenges like limited public funding or the need for digital transformation. They focus on the production and preservation of “non-rival” collective goods such as knowledge and collective memory.
Place-based Policy Approach
This framework recognizes GLAMMONS as locally embedded cultural infrastructures that are context-specific. These policies support institutions that activate local cultural resources and reclaim unused or abandoned spaces, reconfiguring them as accessible sites for learning, experimentation, and community care. This approach ensures that cultural initiatives are anchored in specific locations, making them more likely to produce social, economic, and environmental benefits for local populations.
Open Access (in the GLAM context)
The practice of providing free and inclusive access to cultural resources, particularly in the digital realm. It is built on the premise that a system’s output should serve as future input for further creation. By using legal tools like Creative Commons (CC) licenses, GLAMs can reduce barriers to the reuse and reinterpretation of cultural goods, fostering creativity and ensuring that digital heritage remains a non-rival, collective good for future generations.
Relational Constitution of the Commons
This concept highlights that the commons and the community surrounding it are deeply interdependent and mutually constitutive. In a GLAMMON, the community is not merely an external “stakeholder” or “audience”; instead, the lines between the cultural resource and the people who steward it are blurred. The resource only functions as a “commons” because of the active social relationships and practices of the community, and the community itself is often defined by its shared stewardship of that resource.
Dark Heritage (or Difficult Heritage)
Dark heritage refers to cultural resources or sites associated with trauma, conflict, or painful collective histories. The GLAMMONS framework views the stewardship of such heritage as an opportunity for institutions to move beyond mere preservation toward critical reflection, conflict resolution, and trauma relief. By using commoning practices to address “difficult” pasts, GLAMs can act as vital social infrastructures that support democratic renewal and social justice within their communities.
Indirect Social Reciprocity
As a complex social system, the commons relies on indirect social reciprocity, where an individual’s contribution is not linked to a direct, immediate exchange of value (as in a market transaction). Instead, commoners make “fair-share” contributions to the larger collective with the understanding that the benefits—which are often unmeasurable and manifest over long periods—will sustain the community as a whole. This principle is fundamental to the sustainability of commoning efforts and the management of shared resources like buildings or digital archives.
Co-Production
Co-production is a foundational practice through which the commons are created and reproduced, involving the collective management of resources through horizontal and democratic processes. It is defined by the participation of a variety of people in the creation of cultural meaning, where the outputs are not merely material assets but social and cultural values. In the GLAM context, this practice ensures that cultural outputs reflect community knowledge, experience, and local priorities.
Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP)
Commons-based peer production represents a socio-technical system where large groups of individuals cooperate as producers of information, knowledge, and culture by bypassing traditional managerial hierarchies. It operates as a cyclical dynamic where open raw materials are processed participatorily to create outputs that are added back to the stock of free resources. Unlike extractive models, this mode of production follows “generative entrepreneurship,” which prioritises adding value back to the community.
Mnemeiosis
Mnemeiosis is a counter-process of heritage designation driven by collective and communal memory rather than institutional authority. It is considered a prime example of heritage-making as commoning, where interested communities protect and manage tangible and intangible resources based on their shared visions and traditions.
Generative Entrepreneurship
Generative entrepreneurship is a productive practice within the commons that seeks to add value to communities rather than extracting profit or rent. It stands as the antipode to “platform capitalism” by ensuring that the benefits generated from production are reinvested into the productive community and the common-pool resource.