LES 'PEER PRODUCTION STUDIES': UN CHAMP DE RECHERCHE À CONSTRUIRE? Séminaire du Centre Internet et Société CNRS, 4 décembre 2019 - University of ...
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LES ‘PEER PRODUCTION STUDIES’: UN CHAMP DE RECHERCHE À CONSTRUIRE? Séminaire du Centre Internet et Société CNRS, 4 décembre 2019 MATHIEU O’NEIL UNIVERSITY OF CANBERRA
Elinor Ostrom (Nobel Prize Eco 2009)
● Beyond private/public dichotomy
● There never was a “tragedy of the
commons”
● Hardin’s overgrazing farmers were victims
of a “tragedy of management” - their
common pasture was not properly self-
regulated
Peer production is the collective self-
regulated production and
management of common-pool
(digital?) resources
O’Neil, Toupin, Pentzold (2020) Chapter 1 – The Duality of Peer Production: Building Infrastructure for the Commons, Providing Free Labor for Firms, Handbook of Peer Production. It sometimes seems as if “peer production” and “digital commons” can be used interchangeably. Digital commons are non-rivalrous (they can be reproduced at little or no cost) and non-excludable (no-one can prevent others from using them, through property rights for example). Practically speaking, proprietary objects could be produced by equal “peers,” however peer production has a normative dimension, so that what chiefly characterizes this mode of production is that “the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production” (Söderberg & O'Neil, 2014, p. 2). commons-based peer production vs commons-based and oriented peer production
What I won’t talk about:
o institutions and governance
o social movements
o Wikipedia
o impact of scope: project evolution over time
o motivation (‘extrinsic’ or ‘intrinsic’?)
o biohacking, peer learning, makers
o feminist issues
o failures of peer design and licenses
o etc
o Image: reviewing chapters in the Handbook
of Peer Production
Peer Production as object of study
● Evolution: from open knowledge (FOSS, Wikipedia) to open design and
manufacturing
● Constitution, promoters, network, field?
● Central paradox: duality of ambiguous relationship to private enclosure
● My PhD: ethnography of underground publication networks in the San Francisco Bay
Area, 1993
● Survey of North American publishers on Usenet-zines, 1997
● Aware of free software late 1990s
● Weblogs early-mid 2000s
From zines to: • Weblogs • Debian • Wikipedia Self-regulation in non-hierarchical networks 4th Oekonux Conference (2009)
JoPP launched in 2011 • Public email list • Extreme peer review
Part I – Introduction Chapter 01 – The Duality of Peer Production: Infrastructure for the Commons, Free Labor for Firms (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold) Part II – Concepts: Explaining Peer Production Chapter 02 – Grammar of Peer Production (Vasilis Kostakis & Michel Bauwens) Chapter 03 – Political Economy of Peer Production (Benjamin Birkinbine) Chapter 04 – Social Norms and Rules of Peer Production (Christian Pentzold) Chapter 05 – Cultures of Peer Production (Michael Stevenson) Chapter 06 (reprint) – Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue (Yochai Benkler & Helen Nissenbaum) Part III – Conditions: Enabling Peer Production Chapter 07 – Prophets and Advocates (George Dafermos) Chapter 08 – Virtue, Efficiency, and the Sharing Economy (Margie Borschke) Chapter 09 – Openness and Licensing (Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay) Chapter 10 – User Motivations in Peer Production (Sebastian Spaeth & Sven Niederhöfer) Chapter 11 – Governing for Growth in Scope: Cultivating a Dynamic Understanding of How Peer Production Collectives Evolve (Rebecca Karp, Amisha Miller & Siobhan O’Mahony)
Part IV – Cases: Realizing Peer Production Chapter 12 – Free & Open Source Software (Stéphane Couture) Chapter 13 – Wikipedia and Wikis (Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin) Chapter 14 – Hacker Cartography: Participatory Mapmaking and Technological Power (Adam Fish) Chapter 15 – Peer Learning (Panayotis Antoniadis & Alekos Pantazis) Chapter 16 – Biohacking (Morgan Meyer) Chapter 17 – Makers (Yana Boeva & Peter Troxler) Chapter 18 – Blockchain (Pablo Velasco Gonzáles & Nate Tkacz) Chapter 19 – Wireless Community Networks (Gwen Shaffer) Chapter 20 – Urban Commons (Nicholas Anastapoulos) Part V – Conflicts: Peer Production and the World Chapter 21 – Peer Production and Social Change (Mathieu O’Neil & Sébastien Broca) Chapter 22 – Peer Production and Collective Action (Stefania Milan) Chapter 23 – Feminist Peer Production (Sophie Toupin) Chapter 24 – Postcolonial Peer Production (Maitrayee Deka) Chapter 25 – Gaps in Peer Design (Francesca Musiani) Chapter 26 – Makerspaces and Peer Production: Spaces of Possibility, Tension, Post-Automation, or Liberation? (Kat Braybrooke & Adrian Smith) Chapter 27 – Peer Production and State Theory: Envisioning a Cooperative Partner State (Alex Pazaitis & Wolfgang Drechsler) Part VI – Conversions: Advancing Peer Production Chapter 28 – Making a Case for Peer Production: Interviews with Peter Bloom, Mariam Mecky, Ory Okolloh, Abraham Taherivand & Stefano Zacchiroli Chapter 29 – What’s Next? Peer Production Studies? (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold) Chapter 30 – Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
‘The communism of the scientific ethos
is incompatible with the definition of
technology as “private property” in a
capitalistic economy’.
Merton, R. K. (1973) [1942], ‘The normative
Production of scientific structure of science’, in The sociology of science:
Theoretical and empirical investigations. Chicago:
knowledge as moral University of Chicago Press.
endeavour ● universalism
● disinterestedness
● organised scepticism
● communism (later changed: ‘communalism’)● 1960s: MIT model club, Unix
● 1970s: IETF (RFC)
● 1980s: GNU, FSF, GPL (‘copyleft’)
● 1990s: Linux; PageRank
Key principles:
● No ‘bogus’ criteria (Levy, 1984)
● Integrity of product
A brief history of ● Four Freedoms of Free Software
hacking The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any
purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works and change
it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others
(freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions
to others (freedom 3). By doing this you give the whole
community a chance to benefit from your changes.The usual suspects Richard M. Stallman Yochai Benkler Michel Bauwens Free Software Foundation 'Coase’s penguin’ 'The political economy of peer GNU, GPL The Wealth of Networks production’, P2P Foundation
Velasco González & Tkacz (2020) Chapter 18 – ‘Blockchain, or, Peer Production Without Guarantees’, Handbook of Peer Production.
‘P2P’ term usage takes off in early
2000s
1. Mass practice (torrenting via
Napster)
2. Academic interest - Benkler:
‘Peer to Peer’ ●
“commons-based peer production”
productive efficiency superior to firms and
markets
● working collaboratively with peers can only
thrive if people treat each other morally;
cumulative impact of non-exploitative micro-
actions2000s quasi-utopian socio-technical
imaginary
● Oekonux, Michel Bauwens (P2PF),
A. Gorz, Autonomia: commons-
Duality of peer based peer production ‘germ form’
of society beyond exploitation and
production domination
2020s torrenting criminalized out of
existence, in contrast to:
● FOSS - integrated into business
● How did integration happen?O’Neil M (2015) Labour out of control: The political economy of capitalist and ethical organizations. Organization
Studies 36 (12), 1627-1647
commercial logic communal logic
(paid labour) (unpaid labour)
centralised firms; consumption work; co-
governance public service; creation; prosumption
NGOs
modular independent workers; domestic labour;
governance contractors; freelancers voluntary / collectivist
organizationsDelfanti, A & Söderberg J (2018) Repurposing the hacker: Three cycles of recuperation in the evolution of
hacking and capitalism. Ephemera 18(3).
2) the co-evolution
1) the life cycle of
of hacker 3) the position of
an individual
movements and hacking within the
technology or
relevant industries ‘spirit of capitalism'
community
or institutionsO’Neil, Toupin, Pentzold (2020) Chapter 1 – The Duality of Peer Production: Building Infrastructure for the Commons, Providing Free Labor for Firms, Handbook of Peer Production. Christopher Kelty’s (2008) influential definition of F/OSS projects as “recursive” is key to understanding how what was once perceived as a force resisting privatization has been integrated into dominant circuits of capital. Hackers have extremely divergent politics, but they all agree that proprietary software and intellectual property rights, as well as surveillance and censorship, should be rejected. This stems from the fact that such an opposition constitute the techno- legal preconditions for the hacker public to exist as such: “recursive politics” aim to consolidate and grow the material conditions for the survival of the hacker public. In contrast issues such as feminism and workers’ rights are not “recursive” in the sense that hackers “perceive them to be unrelated to what really matters to them the most, computers and Internet freedom” (Delfanti & Söderberg, 2018, p. 463).
IT firms have embraced open source licenses and the ‘hacker ethic’ of self-
fulfillment
• In 2018 Google moved from Ubuntu to Debian; Microsoft bought GitHub; 85% of Linux
code was produced by firm employees
• Microsoft joined the Open Innovation Network, a ‘defensive patent pool and community
of patent non-aggression’ aiming to protect Linux
• Ethnography at Linux Foundation European Open Source Summit (October
2019): FOSS standard; end-user companies such as Sony, not just IT firms, are
setting up Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs); firms attempt to format
projects• Online survey of Debian project participants (1479 responses) + interviews DDs
• Intermingling of firm commercial logic & communal logic of the project requires
rhetorical legitimation, organizational mechanisms facilitate cooperation
○ First phase of legitimation, based on self-fulfillment, aims to erase the
commercial / communal divide
○ Second, more recent legitimation seeks to ‘professionalise’ work
relations inside the project
○ In doing so challenges the social order which restricts participation in
F/OSSFUNDING!?
O’Neil, Cai, Muselli, Zacchiroli (2020) Mapping ‘Open Source’ Capitalism: The firm-volunteer project co- production network and its media representation. Accepted, Section on Communication, Information Technologies and Media Sociology, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting (7-11 August).
Proportion of commits made by firms
Number and proportion of commits made by firm employees to top-20 most active projects on GitHub
Number of commits made by Proportion of commits made by
Rank Project Total number of commits
firms firms
1 torvalds/linux 247864 340710 0.73
2 NixOS/nixpkgs 63042 125205 0.5
3 Homebrew/homebrew-core 54352 108709 0.5
4 apple/swift 40351 67197 0.6
5 kubernetes/kubernetes 40041 74201 0.54
6 Microsoft/vscode 37366 49418 0.76
7 tensorflow/tensorflow 29515 56656 0.52
8 dotnet/corefx 25660 32884 0.78
9 DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped 17920 54801 0.33
10 aspnet/AspNetCore 16486 34946 0.47
11 spring-projects/spring-boot 16357 17855 0.92
12 ansible/ansible 16252 31544 0.52
13 elastic/elasticsearch 16051 33983 0.47
14 rust-lang/rust 15897 57790 0.28
15 facebook/react-native 12704 16908 0.75
16 moby/moby 11743 24472 0.48
17 home-assistant/home-assistant 10756 18876 0.57
18 pytorch/pytorch 10492 17717 0.59
19 apache/spark 8584 15180 0.57
20 storybooks/storybook 7297 18968 0.38Size of commits
Field of peer 1. Do we need a field?
‘Network’ vs ‘Field’
production
2.
Working assumption: division between
studies? business oriented (how to improve firm
innovation and efficiency) and activist
(towards post-capitalism) perspectivesName URL Activity Journal of Peer Production http://peerproduction.net/ Research P2P Foundation https://p2pfoundation.net/ Activism David Bollier. News and perspectives on http://www.bollier.org/ Activism the commons Das Commons-Institut https://commons-institut.org/ Activism Samer Hasan https://samer.hassan.name/ Research David Rozas https://davidrozas.cc/ Research P2P Models / Hasan http://p2pmodels.eu Funding Effimera Effimera.org Activism Torange Khonsari https://www.publicworksgroup.net/ Research Heteropolitics. Refiguring the Common https://heteropolitics.net/ Research and the Political Peer to Peer. The Commons Manifesto https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/10.16997/book33/ Activism Peer to peer university - MIT https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/peer-2-peer-university/overview/ Research Cosmolocalism https://www.cosmolocalism.eu/ Research Ford & Sloan Foundations https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/announcing-13m-in-funding-for-digital-infrastructure-research/ Funding Yochai Benkler https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/ybenkler Research Commons – Böll Stiftung https://www.boell.de/de/commons Activism Commons-based peer production https://rcc.harvard.edu/commons-based-peer-production Research Commons-Based Peer Production http://directory.p2pvalue.eu/ Activism directory Dimmons Research Group http://dimmons.net/ Research P2P Lab http://www.p2plab.gr/en/ Research Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/ Development Commons Transition https://primer.commonstransition.org/ Activism Oekonux http://www.oekonux.org/ Activism Github https://github.com/ Development P2Pvalue https://p2pvalue.eu/ Research Benjamin Mako Hill https://mako.cc/ Research
O’Neil, Toupin, Pentzold (2020) Chapter 29 – What’s Next? Peer Production Studies?, Handbook of Peer Production. We asked at the outset: “Should there be a field of peer production studies?” The answer is: why not, but also: who cares? Ultimately when it comes to one’s personal interest in peer production, considering it analytically, as an object of study, is perhaps less important than getting involved as a participant.
Peer practice in action: Precious Plastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=91&v=2KlW_WmV3Bw&feature=emb_logo
Mair, S. (2020) What will the world look like after Coronavirus? The Conversation (30 March).
● Climate crisis: need to
Grow support relocalise, degrow
systems for the
● Recognise contributions (see
commons
Fureai Kippu in Japan)
● Creation of Commons Policy
CouncilThanks!
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