This series provides theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within communication and media studies. Each volume provides experienced scholars and teachers with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions, while grounding and orientating students with a broad range of specially commissioned chapters.
The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development, edited by Sandra L. Calvert and Barbara J. Wilson
The Handbook of Crisis Communication, edited by W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay
The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess
The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, edited by Shawn J. Parry‐Giles and J. Michael Hogan
The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, edited by Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani
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The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media, edited by Karen Ross
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The Handbook of Psychology of Communication Technology, edited by S. Shyam Sundar
The Handbook of International Crisis Communication Research, edited by Andreas Schwarz, Matthew W. Seeger, and Claudia Auer
The Handbook of Peer Production, edited by Mathieu O’Neil, Christian Pentzold, and Sophie Toupin
Forthcoming
The Handbook of Strategic Communication, edited by Carl Botan
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Title: The handbook of peer production / edited by Mathieu O’Neil, University of Canberra, Christian Pentzold, Leipzig University, Sophie Toupin, McGill University.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021. | Series: Handbooks in communication and media | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020025498 (print) | LCCN 2020025499 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119537106 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119537144 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119537113 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119537090 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Open source software. | Computer file sharing. | Shareware (Computer software) | Information commons.
Set in 9.5/11.5pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
28 Making a Case for Peer Production: Interviews with Peter Bloom, Mariam Mecky, Ory Okolloh, Abraham Taherivand, and Stefano Zacchiroli
What’s Next? Peer Production Studies?
Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, and Christian Pentzold 30 Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons
Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, and Christian Pentzold
List of Figures
Figure 2.1Five of the longest‐running and better‐known commons‐based peer production ecosystems.
Figure 2.2Three emerging commons‐based peer production ecosystems.
Figure 2.3The ecosystem of a single commons‐based peer production initiative.
Figure 3.1The Circuit of the Commons.
Figure 11.1Modes of collective production.
Figure 12.1Source code.
27
27
28
40
145
157
Figure 12.2Bottom‐up innovation in free software development (Cardon, 2005). 160
Figure 13.1Articles in World of Science database 1994–2018 with wiki* in the article title.
Figure 15.1P2P University community forum <p2pu.org> stresses the duality between teaching and learning, “we are all teachers and learners” (accessed: 3 March, 2020).
170
200
Figure 15.2The Openki.net home page in the Zurich region, encouraging the visitors to think “what do I [really] want to learn?” (accessed, 3 March, 2020). 200
Figure 15.3A moment at the Tzoumakers.gr makerspace depicting the friendly relationship between local experts and community members toward building common experiences and exchanging knowledge. 202
Figure 15.4The entrance of L200 at Langstrasse 200, Zurich, which stresses the multiple potential uses of the space.
Figure 16.1The European DIYbio code of ethics, drafted in 2011 in London. 220
Figure 18.1Google Ngram query for “p2p,” “peer to peer,” and “peer production.” 239
Figure 20.1A daily tradition of people engaging in dialogue that takes place in a shallow crater‐like circle. El Ejido Park, Quito. 2014. 271
Figure 20.2Mobilization of people in the making of Navarinou Park. Athens, 2009. 273
Figure 20.3Le PaPoMo (Parlement Populaire Mobile): Creation of a mobile parliament by Collectif ETC for public spaces, that local communities and associations can borrow in order to organize pirate events or symposiums. Marseille, France 2015. 276
Figure 20.4Paying a visit at the Atucucho neighborhood, Quito, Ecuador, and Al Borde architects collective’s intervention in the creation of a communal space with discarded concrete test tubes. August, 2015.
277
Figure 25.1Screen shot of Faroo’s control panel, allowing users to monitor and supervise their contributions to the distributed search engine. 337
Table 1.1Organizational governance and logic: A typology.
Table 5.1Boltanski and Thévenot’s “orders of worth” (1999, p. 368). 65
Table 9.1Open Licenses (derived from https://opendefinition.org/licenses/). 110
Table 10.1Overview of individual‐level motivations in open source software production. 124
Table 11.1Peer production collectives founding characteristics.
Table 11.2Change in scope and governance rights.
Table 11.3Governing for growth: advancing a research agenda.
Table 12.1Free software definition.
Table 12.2Most used licenses on Github (April 2, 2019).
Table 12.3Free and open source software as the Internet infrastructure.
Table 12.4Some experiences of migration to free and open source software in Europe. 162
Table 16.1Projects by community laboratories that participated to the iGEM competitions between 2014 and 2019.
Table 29.1Seed
Table
Notes on Contributors
Nicholas Anastasopoulos is an architect, researcher, and assistant professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens. He holds a PhD from the same university in alternative communities and sustainability and a MArch from Yale. He has taught at Patras University, Parsons School of Design (NYC), and elsewhere. As postdoctoral Prometeo Researcher (IAEN, Ecuador, 2014) he contributed to the FLOK Society project and conducted research on aspects of Buen Vivir and sustainability. Nicholas has conducted extensive research and collaborated with architects, artists, and researchers in Ecuador, Europe, and South America. He initiated the MET workshop and the Ports in Transition Workshops (Europe and South America) for spatial policies. His research interests concern the commons, communities, systems theory, ecology, and complexity. He is currently academic representative and senior researcher in charge on behalf of NTUA for SoPHIA, a H2020 consortium research program aiming to create a Social Platform on Holistic Impact Assessment of European Cultural Heritage.
Panayotis Antoniadis is the co‐founder of NetHood, a Zurich‐based non‐profit organization that combines research and action in the development of tools for self‐organization and conviviality, bringing together different forms of commoning in the city such as community networks, complementary currencies, and cooperative housing. http://nethood.org/panayotis/
Michel Bauwens is a Peer‐to‐Peer (P2P) theorist and a writer, researcher, and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture, and business innovation. He is a theorist in the emerging field of P2P theory and the director and founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organization of researchers and activists working collaboratively to explore peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of books and essays, including his seminal essay “The Political Economy of Peer Production.” In 2014, Michel was the research director of the transition project towards the social knowledge economy, an official project in Ecuador (see floksociety.org). This project produced a first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create a “social knowledge economy.” In 2016, Michel was Honorary Fellow/Visiting Scholar with the Havens Center at UW‐Madison, as an “activist in resident” funded by the Link Foundation.
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, USA. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked economy and society. His books include Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006), which won academic awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the McGannon award for
social and ethical relevance in communications. His work is socially engaged, winning him the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for 2007, and the Public Knowledge IP3 Award in 2006. Benkler has advised governments and international organizations on innovation policy and telecommunications, and serves on the boards or advisory boards of several nonprofits engaged in working towards an open society. His work can be freely accessed at benkler.org.
Benjamin J. Birkinbine is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Reynolds School of Journalism and Center for Advanced Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. His research is grounded in the critical political economy of communication tradition with a specific focus on the digital commons and free and open source software. He is the author of Incorporating the Commons (University of Westminster Press, 2020) and the co‐editor (along with Rodrigo Gómez and Janet Wasko) of Global Media Giants (Routledge, 2017). He is currently a Vice Chair of the Political Economy section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.
Peter Bloom holds a BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, USA, and a Master’s degree in Rural Development from the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Xochimilco, Mexico. He was the founder in 2002 and ex‐director of Juntos, the first organization in Philadelphia dedicated to organizing and defending the human rights of Latino immigrants. In 2009 Peter began working in Nigeria as a development consultant and media maker and lived in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria for two years, co‐founding the Media for Justice Project based outside of Port Harcourt. Since 2011 Peter has been coordinating Rhizomatica, an organization he started to promote new communication technologies that helps run the first community‐owned and managed cell phone network in the Americas.
Yana Boeva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology of Technology and Environment, Institute for Social Sciences, as well as at the Cluster of Excellence on Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture based at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She has studied makerspaces and fab labs in Western Europe and Canada focusing on the socio‐political and historical dimensions of digital fabrication in design towards de‐professionalization of design practice, concepts of expertise, and notions of re‐industrialization. Her current research explores the transformation of design, architectural practice, and different user perceptions with the inclusion of active matter and automation in contemporary fabrication models. She holds a PhD (2018) in Science and Technology Studies from York University, Toronto, and an MA (2011) in Media Studies from Humboldt University Berlin.
Margie Borschke is the author of This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). She is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Media in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Kat Braybrooke is a designer and digital anthropologist whose work explores the critical implications of the spaces and practices of creative digital communities in places like Europe and China as sites of social and environmental transformation. She is Research Fellow in the School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex, UK, and Visiting Researcher in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Web: http://codekat.net.
Sébastien Broca is a sociologist. He is currently Associate Professor in the Media and Communication Department at Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint‐Denis, France. He works on digital capitalism and on the digital commons, at the crossroads of political economy and critical theory. He has published Utopie du logiciel libre (Le passager clandestin, 2013). He is currently involved in the research projects EnCommuns and TAPAS and is co‐editor of the scholarly journal Anthropology&Materialism. sebastien.broca@univ‐paris8.fr
Stéphane Couture is an assistant professor at University of Montreal, Canada. Trained in computer science, sociology, and communication studies, he has completed several research projects on the collaborative practices and cultures of free and open source software. He has also studied and been engaged in initiatives related to alternative media, digital activism, and the relationship between democracy and technology more broadly.
George Dafermos is a postdoctoral researcher at the Heteropolitics research project at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where he explores the transformative potential of commons‐based peer production. He has been involved in several of the projects mentioned in the chapter “Prophets and Advocates of Peer Production”: he was a participant in the Oekonux Project (2002–2013) and a core member of the FLOK Society Project in Ecuador (2013–2014). He is also a founding member of the Journal of Peer Production and a research associate of the P2P Foundation.
Maitrayee Deka is a Lecturer in Media and Social Theory at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK. Her research focuses on economic sociology, new media, consumption cultures, and social theory. She is currently working on her monograph, Traders and Tinkers: The Popular Economy of the Bazaar that is based on an ethnographic account of Delhi’s electronic marketplaces. Her most recent publication is “Embodied Commons: Knowledge and Sharing in Delhi’s Electronic Bazaars,” The Sociological Review, 66(2), 365–380, 2018.
Wolfgang Drechsler is Professor of Governance at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, Honorary Professor at University College London in the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose, UK, and Associate and member of the advisory board at Harvard University’s Davis Center, USA. In civil service, he has been Advisor to the President of Estonia, Executive Secretary with the German Wissenschaftsrat, and, as an APSA Congressional Fellow, Senior Legislative Analyst in the United States Congress. Wolfgang’s main interests are Public Management, Technology, and Innovation; Non‐Western Public Administration, Governance, and Economics (especially Buddhist, Confucian, and Islamic); and Public Management Reform generally.
Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, PhD in law, has been an associate research professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 2010 and is the director of the Center for Internet and Society of CNRS (UPR 2000) which she co‐founded with Francesca Musiani in 2019. Her research focuses on digital commons, regulation by technology, information technology law and policy. She has co‐edited four open access collective books on the digital public domain and digital commons. She is a founding member and was the legal lead for Creative Commons France, a fellow at Science Commons, a staff member of Creative Commons Netherlands, a staff member of the Communia European Thematic Network, and a founding member of the Communia association for the digital public domain, which she represented at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as the first chair of its administrative council. She was also member of the board and vice‐president of the scientific board of OpenEdition scientific publishing platform (2010–2019). melanie. dulong@cnrs.fr; @melanieddr
Adam Fish is an associate professor and Scientia fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts and Media, at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural anthropologist, documentary video producer, and interdisciplinary scholar who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts. Dr. Fish employs ethnographic, participatory, and creative methods to examine the social, political, and ecological influences of new technologies. He has authored three books including: Hacker States (2020 MIT Press with Luca Follis), about how state hacking impacts democracy; Technoliberalism (2017 Palgrave Macmillan), an ethnography of the politics of Internet and television convergence in Hollywood and Silicon Valley; and After the Internet (2017 Polity Press with Ramesh Srinivasan), which reimagines the Internet from the perspective of
grassroots activists, citizens, and hackers on the margins of political and economic power. He is currently completing a book, Drone Justice, with MIT Press.
Jutta Haider is Professor of Information Studies at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, and Reader in Information Studies at Lund University, both in Sweden. She holds a doctorate from City, University of London, UK (2008). Her research concerns information practices and infrastructures in relation to digital cultures’ conditions for production, use, and distribution of knowledge and information. This includes research on information inequalities and on knowledge institutions, such as encyclopedias, search engines, and the scholarly communication system. She is author of Invisible Search and Online Search Engines: The Ubiquity of Search in Everyday Life (Routledge, 2019).
Rebecca Karp is a PhD candidate at Boston University Questrom School of Business, Boston, USA. She is a field researcher who studies how firms and collectives learn, adapt, and upend their strategies for growth and sustained competitive advantage when confronted with how different market actors interact with their innovations. Her research specifically considers how innovators deploy resources to gain market acceptance, economic traction, and grow market relevancy for their innovations.
Vasilis Kostakis is the Professor of P2P Governance within the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at TalTech, Estonia. He is also a Faculty Associate within the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Professor within the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is the founder of the P2P Lab. In 2018, Vasilis was awarded a four‐year grant from the European Research Council, to study the convergence of the digital commons with local manufacturing technologies. Along with an interdisciplinary team of scholars, activists, and social entrepreneurs, Vasilis focuses on how to create an economy based on locally sustainable communities that are digitally interconnected. His work has appeared in 15 languages.
Mariam Mecky is an Egyptian feminist researcher. She received an MA in Gender Studies and Law at SOAS, University of London in 2018 as a Chevening Scholar and a BA in Political Science from the British University in Egypt in 2013. Mecky has worked as a researcher, journalist, and NGO worker focusing broadly on gender issues and politics in Egypt and the MENA region at large. Alongside her current research work, she is the Communication Unit head at HarassMap, an anti‐sexual harassment NGO in Egypt. Her interests include but are not limited to: feminist mobilization and activism, gender‐based violence, body politics, resistance, and legal reform.
Morgan Meyer is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He holds a PhD in Sociology (University of Sheffield) and has been a visiting professor at the University of Vienna (Department of Science and Technology Studies) and a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh (Genomics Forum). His research concentrates on three main topics: (1) participation and co‐production of knowledge (natural history, do‐it‐yourself biology, open source agriculture), (2) new configurations and communities in biology (synthetic biology, gene editing), (3) intermediation, translation, and representation of knowledge.
Stefania Milan is a digital sociologist interested in new forms of political participation facilitated by technological innovation. Stefania is Associate Professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she leads a research project exploring the design and governance of technology standards from a human rights perspective, funded by the Dutch Research Council. Previously she worked at the European University Institute, Central European University, Tilburg University, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and the University of Oslo. In 2015–2021 she was the principal investigator of two projects financed by the European Research Council exploring data‐ and algorithmic‐mediated forms of civic engagement (data‐activism.net and algorithms.exposed). She is the author of, among others, Social Movements and their Technologies:
Wiring Social Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013/2016), and co‐author of Media/Society (Sage, 2011). Stefania enjoys creating bridges between research, activism, and policymaking, and experimenting with methodological innovation. Website: stefaniamilan.net
Amisha Miller is a PhD candidate at Boston University Questrom School of Business, Boston, USA. She studies how entrepreneurs and their early‐stage firms interact with actors from outside the firm to create value. More specifically, her field research explores how diverse entrepreneurs and early‐stage firms can interact with institutions, collectives, and communities that support entrepreneurs, to create valuable firms and products, and more inclusive institutions.
Francesca Musiani (PhD, socio‐economics of innovation, MINES ParisTech, 2012), has been an associate research professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 2014. She is Deputy Director of the Center for Internet and Society at CNRS, which she co‐founded with Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay in 2019. She is also an associate researcher at the Center for the sociology of innovation (i3/MINES ParisTech) and a Global Fellow at the Internet Governance Lab, American University in Washington, DC. She is the author and editor of several books including Nains sans géants. Architecture décentralisée et services Internet (Dwarfs Without Giants: Decentralized Architecture and Internet Services, Presses des Mines, 2013 [2nd ed. 2015], recipient of the French Privacy and Data Protection Commission’s Prix Informatique et Libertés 2013).
Sven Niederhöfer is a research assistant at the Chair of Management and Digital Markets at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He studied Information Systems at Technische Universität Darmstadt and Tampere University of Technology in Finland. His research interests cover innovation management, digital platforms, and business ecosystems. Specifically, he is researching aspects related to orchestrating digital platform ecosystems.
Helen Nissenbaum is a professor at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science Department at Cornell University, USA. Her research takes an ethical perspectives on policy, law, science, and engineering relating to information technology, computing, digital media, and data science. Topics have included privacy, trust, accountability, security, and values in technology design. Her books include Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015) and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010).
Ory Okolloh currently serves as Managing Director, Luminate Group. Luminate is a global philanthropic organization that funds non‐profit and for‐profit organizations that help people participate in and shape the issues affecting their lives, and make those in power more transparent, responsive, and accountable. Based in Nairobi Ory is also tasked helping the drive the growth of Omidyar Network’s overall investment portfolio in Africa. Prior to this, Ory was Google’s policy manager for Africa. Previously, Ory was at the forefront of developing technology innovation as a founding member of Ushahidi. She served as the organization’s executive director from inception until December 2010. Ory is also the co‐founder of Mzalendo, a web site that tracks the performance of Kenyan MPs. In 2011 she was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and one of Africa’s most Powerful Women by Forbes Magazine. In 2014 she was named Time 100’s most influential people in the world. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, is an Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN) Fellow, and an advisory board member to Twiga Foods and Endeavor Kenya. Ory earned a JD from Harvard Law School and a BA in political science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Siobhán O’Mahony is the Feld Family Professor, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Strategy and Innovation at the Boston University Questrom School of Business and the Academic Director of Innovate@BU, Boston, USA. She received her PhD in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Professor O’Mahony’s research examines organizing processes in community and project forms and how creative and technical collectives organize for innovation, creativity, and growth. Her work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science,
Academy of Management Journal, Research Policy, Research in Organizational Behavior, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Industry and Innovation, the Journal of Management and Governance among other edited volumes. somahony@bu.edu
Mathieu O’Neil is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Canberra’s News & Media Research Centre, where he leads the Critical Conversations Lab, and Honorary Associate Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University, where he co‐founded the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks. Mathieu’s research examines the policy and organizational aspects of commons‐based peer production, as well as risk issue diffusion and the adoption of causes and innovations in the online environment. His book Cyberchiefs (2009) was the first systematic examination of governance in peer production projects. He is the founder and maintainer of the Journal of Peer Production. His work has been published in Social Networks, the Journal of Peer Production, Réseaux, Information, Communication & Society, Organization Studies, and New Media and Society, amongst others. mathieu.oneil@canberra.edu.au
Alekos (Alexandros) Pantazis is a core member of the P2P Lab, an interdisciplinary research collective focused on the commons, and a junior research fellow at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. Moreover, Alekos has 20 years of involvement in international civil movements, focusing on agrarian indigenous populations and the commons. He is pursuing a PhD on the convergence of convivial technologies, commons, and non‐formal education.
Alex Pazaitis is a core member of the interdisciplinary research collective P2P Lab, a spin‐off of the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and of the P2P Foundation, and Junior Research Fellow and PhD candidate at the Ragnar Nurkse Department. Alex is involved in numerous research activities and research and innovation projects. He has professional experience in project management and has worked as a consultant for private and public organizations. His research interests include technology governance; innovation policy; digital commons; open cooperativism and distributed ledger technologies.
Christian Pentzold is Professor of Media and Communication in the Department for Communication and Media Studies at Leipzig University. Before that, he worked in the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen and at Chemnitz University of Technology. He is broadly interested in the construction and appropriation of digital media and the roles, information and communication technologies play in modern society. His work in communication research and media analysis links to insights coming from cultural sociology, linguistics, as well as science and technology studies. Currently he is looking at the public understanding of big data, the organization, and governance of peer production, as well as the interplay of time, data, and media. Beyond that, he is interested in applying theories of practice to the study of media and communication and in linking qualitative with quantitative methods.
Gwen Shaffer is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Public Relations at California State University, Long Beach, USA, where she teaches courses on Internet regulation and communication law. Her research on topics such as broadband connectivity and data privacy explore ways in which digital exclusion and algorithmic bias compound existing challenges. Her research has been published in the Journal of Information Policy, Media, Culture & Society, First Monday, and the Association for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on Internet Technology, among other journals and book chapters. She has also co‐authored policy papers on topics such as mobile phone privacy and digital inclusion. Gwen Shaffer chairs the City of Long Beach’s Technology and Innovation Commission, which advises the mayor and City Council on relevant policy issues.
Adrian Smith is Professor of Technology and Society at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, UK. He is involved in interdisciplinary research projects investigating the politics
of technology and innovation for sustainable development. He has a particular interest in grassroots involvement in this politics, and questions of democracy. This has included studies of makerspaces in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Sebastian Spaeth holds the Chair of Management and Digital Markets at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He studied Business and Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and graduated at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University, Sweden. He received his doctorate in Business Administration from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland where, cooperating with Georg von Krogh, he examined open source software development projects. He conducted research on collaborative open innovation and collaborative business models as a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. In 2013, he founded the Chair of Management and Digital Markets at the University of Hamburg to focus on the challenges and opportunities arising from the digitalization of society for citizens and organization. He has published in the Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Research Policy, Information Systems Research, and MIS Quarterly
Michael Stevenson is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests include a range of topics in Internet history, software studies, and digital culture. He is working on a book called Making Media New, about the historical development of social media and the broader new media field in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2019 he made Geeks in Cyberspace, a web documentary about a group of open source software enthusiasts who created the influential websites Slashdot, Everything2, and PerlMonks.
Olof Sundin is Professor in Information Studies at Lund University, Sweden. He holds a doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden (2003). His work primarily concerns the configuration of information in contemporary society, the construction of public knowledge in relation to trust, and information searching and use. He has investigated Wikipedia, as well as commercial encyclopedias, from a perspective of use and findability as well as in terms of how encyclopedic information is constructed. In 2019, he published the book Invisible Search and Online Search Engines: The Ubiquity of Search in Everyday Life (Routledge).
Abraham Taherivand studied Business Informatics, Information Management and Engineering and Design Thinking. He is a multiple award‐winner at national and international business plan competitions, holds various patents, and has been a serial entrepreneur since 2008 in the tech, Internet, and consumer sector. He has worked as a strategy consultant in various projects for companies and organizations. Since 2012 he has worked for Wikimedia Deutschland. He is the co‐founder of the first worldwide free structured knowledge database Wikidata and was awarded the Open Data Award by Tim Berners‐Lee and his teams. Since December 2016, Abraham Taherivand has been the Managing Director of Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Nathaniel Tkacz is a reader in digital media and culture and Deputy Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, UK. He has written widely and critically on the topics of peer production, currency, money, and software culture. In 2012, he co‐founded the MoneyLab network in Europe with Geert Lovink and is co‐editor of the first MoneyLab Reader (2015). He has edited and authored a number of other monographs, including Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness (2015).
Sophie Toupin is a Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et culture (FRQSC) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam where she explores the linkages between feminism, data and infrastructure. She completed her PhD in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her doctoral research examined the relationship between technology and anticolonialism during the South African antiapartheid struggle. Her work has been published in New Media and Society, Feminist Media Studies, Canadian Journal of Communication, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, and Journal of Peer Production, among others.
Peter Troxler is a research professor at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. He studies how emerging ways of designing and manufacturing by “fabbers” and “makers,” enabled by readily available direct digital manufacturing technologies, challenge and influence incumbent practices in the creative and manufacturing industries. His research interests are the intersections and interdependencies of people, technology, business, society, and the environment. He also investigates how new paradigms of cooperation and business models are developed based on network patterns, self‐organization, lateral governance, and open source principles. He holds a PhD (1999) in Technology, Management and Economics and an MSc (1993) in Industrial Engineering, both from ETH Zurich. He has worked internationally in the energy industry, as a consultant to private and public sector enterprises, as a researcher and research manager in organizational psychology and artificial intelligence, and as a director and producer in various artistic projects in music, theater, literature, and social arts.
Pablo Velasco González is an assistant professor in the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he co‐directs the Center for the Study of Technological, Emerging, and Ethical Methods. His work has focused on digital culture and politics of technical devices, in particular blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. He has collaborated on these and other topics in two Moneylab Readers (2015, 2018), the Metaphilosophy and APRA journals, and several book chapters. More information about his work can be found at pablov.me
Stefano Zacchiroli is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Paris Diderot, France, and is currently on leave at Inria. His research interests span formal methods, software preservation, and free/open source software engineering. He is co‐founder and current CTO of the Software Heritage project. He has been an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, and was elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for three consecutive terms from 2010 to 2013. He is a former Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and recipient of the 2015 O’Reilly Open Source Award.
Preface
The Handbook of Peer Production has emerged from a community of researchers, practitioners, and activists who share a belief in the virtue of open collaboration. We are grateful for this community’s existence and hope we have been equal to the task of documenting its work. Academic books are always collective endeavors; we are immensely thankful to those who have helped us in bringing this project forward.
The Handbook chapters were peer reviewed by the three editors. In addition, Chapter 1 (“The Duality of Peer Production”), Chapter 29 (“What’s Next?”), and Chapter 30 (“Be Your Own Peer!”) which we co‐wrote, were reviewed by Sébastien Broca. His insightful comments played a substantial part in making our arguments more coherent, so we express our heartfelt thanks for his contribution.
Our congratulations to all the authors who worked hard to follow our timeline and recommendations for a job well done – especially those who came to the project late as others had to drop out. We are also grateful that Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum allowed us to reprint their article “Commons‐Based Peer Production and Virtue.” Thanks to Nils Borchers, George Dafermos, Chris Giotitsas, Vasilis Kostakis, Arwid Lund, and Denise Thwaites for their help during the course of the project.
At Wiley, our thanks go to Haze Humbert who encouraged us to embark on this three‐year endeavor, to Kartiga Ramalingam and Janani Govindankutty who helped us navigate legal issues, as well as to Kelley Baylis, Todd Green, Skyler Van Valkenburgh, and Andrew Minton who supported the volume through various stages of production. Finally, our thanks to Rosemary Morlin for copy‐editing and to Aijth Kumar for putting together the volume’s index.
Mathieu would like to thank Stefan Merten and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation for flying him to the United Kingdom from Australia to attend the 4th Oekonux conference in Manchester back in the day. In Manchester I met for the first time Michel Bauwens, George Dafermos, Johan Söderberg, Athina Karatzogianni, Stefan Merten, and many other researchers and activists. The conference was so much fun and so inspiring that during the closing plenary session I proposed setting up a journal, which eventually became the Journal of Peer Production. On the way to Manchester from London I had made a stop at the Oxford Internet Institute to attend a workshop on online governance organized by two (at the time) emerging researchers: Malte Ziewitz and Christian Pentzold. Years later, Christian and I sometimes bumped into each other at academic conferences and after I suggested we collaborate, he came up with the idea for this Handbook. Sophie Toupin, who by then had joined the Journal of Peer Production editorial team, had complementary research interests and she proved the perfect choice to join us. Working with Christian and Sophie on this labor of love has been a wonderful and enriching experience.
Thanks to my colleagues at the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre for their unwavering support and sound advice. Thanks also to my research associate Xiaolan Cai as well as to my research partner Rob Ackland at the Australian National University’s Virtual Observatory for the
Study of Online Networks for helping us map the online network of peer production actors. Thanks to the Australian National University’s School of Sociology for its continuing support. I am grateful to the University of Canberra’s Faculty of Arts and Design for supporting my Outside Studies Program in 2019, which enabled me to focus on this project and to work with colleagues overseas: George Dafermos (Integral Cooperative, Heraklion), Laure Muselli (Télécom Paris), Giacomo Poderi (IT University of Copenhagen), and last but not least Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay and Francesca Musiani (Centre Internet et Société, CNRS). My parents Mike and Charmian kindly hosted during my time in Paris. At the time of writing (April 2020) my father is fighting Covid‐19. My parents’ politics and humor inspired me. I dedicate this Handbook to them.
Christian would like to thank his colleagues at Bremen and later at Chemnitz University. Both places provided the intellectual environment and academic workplace necessary to pursue such long‐term project. I owe special thanks to my student assistants Lea Neubauer who helped us with the transcriptions of the interviews and Jessica Giesa who compiled the lists of tables and illustrations. Editing this volume and collaborating with Mathieu and Sophie has been an inspiring learning process and I thank them for their dedication, inquisitiveness, and their eye for all the many details that were necessary to make this book happen.
Sophie would like to thank the professors and graduate students in the Communication Studies Department at McGill University who have continued to give her invaluable advice, intellectual support, and community. Joining Mathieu and Christian in editing this Handbook at the beginning of my PhD was at first daunting, but it has proven to be very rewarding. Now that these two long‐term projects are coming to an end – the PhD and the volume – I remain inspired by the many collectives and groups who use the practice of peer production to reimagine the world they want to live in. I dedicate this Handbook to them. Finally, heartfelt thanks to Christian and Mathieu; it has been a delight working with you!
Chapter Summaries
Part I Introduction
1 The Duality of Peer Production: Infrastructure for the Digital Commons, Free Labor for Free‐Riding Firms
Mathieu
O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, & Christian Pentzold
This introductory chapter examines a series of productive tensions located in and around peer production: we interrogate the meaning of peer‐to‐peer infrastructure models and find that some forms of peer infrastructure have thrived, whilst others were effectively banned. We review Yochai Benkler’s influential theorization of “commons‐based peer production,” and ask to what extent it embodies Western, first‐world assumptions. We evaluate the relationship of peer production to the dominant economy, considering the rich scholarship on peer production’s transformational potential, which was inspired by Benkler’s model and is often imbued with utopian overtones. At the same time peer infrastructure plays a central role in the digital economy, and we critically examine political economy understandings which hold that peer production has been recuperated by capitalism and enabled new forms of labor exploitation. We also analyze the organizational form which facilitated the emergence of hybridization between commercial firms and communal projects, outline the aims of this Handbook, and summarize its structure and content.
Part II Concepts: Explaining Peer Production
2 Grammar of Peer Production
Vasilis
Kostakis & Michael Bauwens
In 2005, Michel Bauwens published The Political Economy of Peer Production, which discussed the principles, characteristics, and the future of the then nascent ecosystem of peer production. This chapter revisits Bauwens’ 2005 article, adopting, expanding, and refining the operational concepts – or “grammar” – he used to define peer‐production projects and the institutional ecosystems that sustain them. Our aim is to provide a framework that would give a theoretical underpinning to the transformative practices of peer production. In a time of deep environmental, social and political crisis, it is important to understand how a new kind of society, based on the centrality of the commons and within a reformed market and state, is possible. This chapter, thus, discusses and introduces new paradigmatic ways of value creation that have the potential to be more radically inclusive and sustainable.
3 Political Economy of Peer Production
Benjamin J. Birkinbine
This chapter provides a framework for understanding the political economy of peer production. As such, I interrogate the intersection of peer production and capitalism along two axes. First, I contextualize the rise of peer production within broader structural changes occurring within capitalism and evaluate the extent to which peer production contradicts, or reinforces, these global economic trends. Second, I draw from more recent theories of commons value circuits to position peer production as dialectically situated between capital and the commons, which highlights the ways in which communities of peer producers intersect with circuits of capital accumulation. The question I explore in the latter part of the chapter is whether the emergent cultural practices within peer production have the capability to subvert the prevailing tendencies of capitalism and offer a path toward a post‐capitalist future.
4 Social Norms and Rules in Peer Production
Christian Pentzold
The regulation of peer‐production projects is achieved by the users themselves. These forms of self‐organization and self‐management depend on shared social norms and have generated, in turn, sets of rules. Some of them characterize the larger population of peer‐production projects; others seem to be an attribute of particular projects. The chapter provides an overview and comparison of peer production’s signature norms and rules, it traces their origins and describes their implications for collaboration and editorial work.
5 Cultures of Peer Production
Michael Stevenson
How can we make sense of cultures of peer production, which exist in diverse national, cultural, and language contexts, span several industries and domains, and comprise a range of different organizational structures? To set the groundwork for such an understanding, this chapter argues that it is necessary to see that peer production is, by and large, a form of cultural production, and thus bears structural similarities to existing cultural fields like art, literature, and journalism. The chapter shows how (1) peer‐production projects are clearly embedded in existing cultural fields, and often represent an autonomous form of production that seeks to resist certain economic and political pressures in favor of core values such as meritocracy and openness and (2) such autonomy is achieved through the enactment of those core values, which are in turn related to the social hierarchies, forms of exclusion, and other limitations that characterize these projects and the groups of people who populate them.
6 Commons‐Based Peer Production and Virtue (reprint)
Helen Nissenbaum & Yochai Benkler
Commons‐based peer production is a socio‐economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio‐technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge, or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise. While there are many practical reasons to try to understand a novel system of production that has produced some of the finest software, the fastest supercomputer and some of the best web‐based directories and news sites, here we focus on the ethical, rather than the functional dimension. What does it mean in ethical terms that many individuals can find themselves
cooperating productively with strangers and acquaintances on a scope never before seen? How might it affect, or at least enable, human action and affection, and how would these effects or possibilities affect our capacities to be virtuous human beings? We suggest that the emergence of peer production offers an opportunity for more people to engage in practices that permit them to exhibit and experience virtuous behavior. We posit: (a) that a society that provides opportunities for virtuous behavior is one that is more conducive to virtuous individuals; and (b) that the practice of effective virtuous behavior may lead to more people adopting virtues as their own, or as attributes of what they see as their self‐definition. The central thesis of this chapter is that socio‐technical systems of commons‐based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods but serve as a context for positive character formation. Exploring and substantiating these claims will be our quest, but we begin with a brief tour through this strange and exciting new landscape of commons‐based peer production and conclude with recommendations for public policy.
Part III Conditions: Enabling Peer Production
7 Prophets and Advocates of Peer Production
George Dafermos
From the beginning, boosters of peer production portrayed it as heralding a better way of life. Since then activists and researchers have detected in peer production the seeds of a post‐capitalist society (Oekonux Project, P2P Foundation) or worked to help policy makers and governments transition towards commons‐based models (FLOK Society Project). Others have attempted to engage critical intellectuals inside and outside academia (Journal of Peer Production) and to establish peer production as a promising research field in the social sciences (P2P Lab). This chapter retraces the history of these attempts, teases out their differences and convergences, and evaluates their impact.
8 Virtue, Efficiency, and the Sharing Economy
Margie Borschke
Peer production is assumed to be virtuous and public‐spirited, a networked socio‐economic system of production, that is efficient, promotes individual agency, harnesses collective knowledge, creates robust technologies and information and contributes to sustaining the public domain in the Internet era. This organizational innovation is also often associated with the rise of social networking technologies, practices, and platforms in the 2000s and an ethos of participation, sharing, and remix. Yet at the heart of key conceptualizations of peer production is a tension between virtue and pragmatism, between a belief that particular kinds of networked spaces and practices can enable the development of personal and social virtues and also be more efficient than other forms of production. This tension becomes more visible in the metaphor, practices, and platforms of the sharing economy where ethical debates about agency, property, privacy, and collective rights abound and where utopian rhetoric acts as a cover for the corporate drive for efficiency over ethical concerns. This chapter considers these tensions and how the ideals of peer production were shaped by their social and material histories.
9 Open Licensing Peer Production
Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay
This chapter traces the evolution of legal conditions meant to support the production and flourishing of digital, knowledge, intellectual or information commons by facilitating access and reuse while preserving them from enclosure. Licenses have been drafted and fine‐tuned in order to subvert and adapt copyright rules designed to reserve rather than to grant rights. Different legal options and conditions
set up by peer‐production platforms, or single creators, to users and potential audience can ensure different levels of openness, leading to the construction of informational, cultural, knowledge, or digital commons. From free and open source software to creative works, including scientific articles, cultural heritage, public sector information, and open data, the nature of works which can be peer produced and subjected to an open license extended to functional works such as databases and tangible output, such as open hardware and Internet infrastructure. Reflecting political debates and ideologies in the digital commons sphere, licensing options oscillate between public domain, copyleft, and the reservation or the control of commercial use and derivative rights.
10 User Motivations in Peer Production
Sebastian Spaeth & Sven Niederhöfer
Peer‐production systems often attract larger communities of paid and unpaid volunteers, who contribute to their respective projects. This chapter examines different underlying motivations that fuel these contributions. It thereby takes a tripartite form and summarizes current literature on (1) individual motivations to participate, (2) selection of tasks, and (3) participation in peer production as a social practice. In the first two parts, we draw on self‐determination theory, which discusses various intrinsic (the joy performing the task itself), extrinsic (rewards such as pay), and internalized extrinsic motives (internalized mores and values). The discussed literature shows that contributors are motivated not by a single motive, but by a whole range of interacting intrinsic, internalized extrinsic, and extrinsic motives with different magnitudes. It further shows that peers’ motivation partly determines the type of task they will self‐allocate, whereby (internalized) extrinsic motives seem to play a crucial role in impelling individuals to perform mundane tasks. In the third part, we view peer‐production systems as social practices, conceptualizing these systems as collectives of contributors with shared general principles, whose lives increasingly become intertwined with these communities. Reviewed literature suggests that motivation may be influenced by factors such as social exposure and institutional frameworks.
11 Governing for Growth in Scope: Cultivating a Comparative Understanding of How Peer‐Production Collectives Evolve
Rebecca
Karp, Amisha Miller, & Siobhán O’Mahony
Scholars have been fascinated by the rise of peer‐production collectives and how governance mechanisms can foster or inhibit the growth of new contributors. Few scholars have attended to what explains changes in the scope of innovation activities peer‐production collectives assume. We identify five roles that peer collectives can play in the innovation lifecycle, from idea generation to post‐production review, and compare 12 mature peer collectives to understand how their scope evolved over time. Our provisionary comparative analysis suggests that peer collectives that expanded their scope were more likely to distribute governance rights to contributing participants through a more collaborative mode of production. We offer a framework for analyzing why peer collectives grow differently and articulate a research agenda that embraces a dynamic approach to examining how scope and governance evolves.
Part IV Cases: Realizing Peer Production
12 Free and Open Source Software
Stéphane Couture
Free and open source software (FOSS) was formally launched in the 1980s by Richard Stallman in opposition to proprietary or closed software. Its speed of development was boosted by the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, and Linux became the original example of crowd‐sourced “bazaar” production
whereby the number of eyes “makes all bugs shallow.” This chapter presents the history of FOSS, its modes of production, and its impact on both the infrastructure of the network society and the culture and practices of peer production projects. It ends by addressing some of the challenges FOSS is facing, in particular in terms of developing sustainable models, enhancing diversity in participation, and negotiating its growing integration into market processes.
13 Wikipedia and Wikis
Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin
Wikis are often considered to be the core platform of peer production. This chapter brings together a broad range of research on wikis and Wikipedia from different disciplines. It delineates the central design principles and affordances of wikis and also pays attention to their historical development and embeddedness in society. Wikis are described as content management systems that allow for flexible collaboration without a defined content owner or leader. Users can modify the content and structure of documents directly in their web browser. Edits are usually archived and open to revision. This chapter pays particular attention to the most successful wiki‐based system, the non‐profit, online encyclopedia Wikipedia. As the chapter explains, Wikipedia actually contains a broad range of more or less individual wiki projects and has inspired a plethora of other endeavors, both open source and proprietary. The particular peer production model employed in Wikipedia is elucidated, and in the course also complicated, as is the role of Wikipedia in the contemporary commercial Internet. The chapter concludes by highlighting several tensions emerging from a wiki‐based peer‐production model, between amateurs and experts, human editors and bots, lay knowledge and academic knowledge, and the shaping of trust through external actors.
14 Participatory Cartography: Drones, Countermapping, and Technological Power
Adam Fish
An investigation into participatory cartography – amateur and collaborative mapmaking – exhibits how theories of peer production often neglect how collective collaboration is dependent upon the state and fuels corporate technological development. This chapter investigates four case studies of participatory cartography, using theories of new materialism and technological power to expose the links between volunteerism and capitalism. For example, the participatory mapping project OpenStreetMap and its links to technology companies such as Bytemark and CloudMade, the early days of the US drone hacker network transforming into the for‐profit companies 3DR and DJI, and the problems of inequality related to the Indonesian Dayak community countermapping projects offer vivid examples of how the autonomy of peer production can be limited by elite technological power. Also, the Global Positioning System, the most important technology for participatory mapping, is a highly costly platform financed by the state. The new materialistic approach taken in this chapter emphasizes the entanglements of technology, culture, and politics and the movement of power across these different domains. That peer production is dependent on extant forms of technological power does not extinguish its political potential. On the contrary, the materialism approach invites proponents of peer production to better respond to the inequities associated with elite domination of technological power.
15 P2P Learning
Panayotis Antoniadis & Alekos Pantazis
In this chapter we identify a wide variety of learning projects, platforms, tools, and methodologies which could be characterized as “peer‐to‐peer” and present their main characteristics along three core dimensions (curriculum selection, learning process, and knowledge abstraction). We then discuss how
