Lars Mathiassen from GSU received an honorary doctorate at Umeå University at this year’s annual celebration. In his award lecture, Mathiassen described the intellectual journey that he has taken the from the early efforts to understand collaborative practices to his ongoing studies on polycentric information commons. To explain the world of interactions occurring at multiple levels, as illustrated by the use of Wikipedia and Waze, Mathiassen argued that we have to be willing to deal with complexity instead of rejecting it, and to theorize how polycentric information commons emerge and evolve.