By this I mean some sort of media IP, but one that isn't privately owned. How could an IP like this be managed, including characters, lore, etc?
Sort of related, but Pulgasari is rad as fuck and it would be cool to turn it into some kind of shared project. Maybe a dumb idea, but I just think it would be neat.
I think SCP would be a good example, as it's a crowd-sourced project under CC-SA.
Touhou's somewhat adjacent to this, though restrictions apply. Sort of like a centralized open-source project. Its laissez-faire doujin culture is a key component of how it's been able to foster the following that it has. Honestly bet that 90% of first exposure to Touhou (especially in the West) is through non-official content.
A fun historical example that predates our current views on copyright is the Arthurian Canon. There are settings, characters and deeds that are recurrent, or necessary to understand the "franchise" so-to-speak, but other than that sometimes it goes to weird, fanfictiony places, and sometimes additions to the existing canon catch on and become part of it.
Thinking about it, a lot of folklore is like that, too: collectively owned, in constant motion, but keeping key elements so that it is still recognizable, and compelling.
Don't know if this is helpful, but I wanted to share.
I tried it with r/fifthworldproblems, a dark surrealist sci-fi subreddit where you couldn't reference existing canons. Ideally the goal was to have an evolving idea of something new that didn't fall back on stagnant ropes. In reality, there are three kinds of people in this world:
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Me, precious
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People who are poisoned by Lovecraft Brain
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People who see an existing idea and latch onto it without yes-anding.
The first group is fine. Always quality, never had any problems, easy on the eyes. It's the second and third groups which made that idea and r/seventhworldproblems go to shit within a year. Unless it's rigidly controlled like SCP, most of the people participating just want to write fan-fiction about the stories they already know. To most people, "dark sci-fi" just means Cthulhu doing that one thing it does. Others see what works but not why so they just endlessly reference whatever original ideas emerged on the forum. Total decentralisation didn't work at all and now there's some reactionary goober beating the dead horse to deather. You need some kind of guiding force behind it if only for quality control, and people hate when you reject their post for quality control.
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