Best practices for managing the commons, however, suggest that maintainers should avoid allocating attention toward extractive contributions. In Ostrom’s language, this is the equivalent of members ignoring outside input (whether from the government, the market, or other opinionated outsiders) on how to manage their shared resource, if the advisor is not part of the community that governs it. Not everybody can participate, regardless of enthusiasm or good intentions, because if producer attention is not carefully managed it will be depleted.

