Re: [ox-en] Project / Book

Hi Mathieu, Stefan, all,

Mathieu O'Neil wrote:
> I suppose the central question is, would it be a good idea to have two books - one a broad-based academic resource on peer-to-peer production, governance and - ahem - property (@Athina and Phoebe: I would def. try to get Yochai Benkler - Coases Penguin or whatever - foundational author...) another a shorter and more strictly marxist-political, more engaged and focused analysis of peer production? 
> 
> From one perspective [a], this might seem as too much, as "crowding the market" with similar products. Fair enough.
> 
> From another perspective [b], it would make sense - the books seen as complementary rather than competing, and though there would inevitably be a bit of overlap, this could be minimised with some collaboration between projects.

I tend to perspective [b].

And Stefan Merten wrote:
> * Separate articles or a big narrative?
> 
>   Mathieu outlined a number of chapters containing separate articles.
>   This is clearly an option. It also certainly reflects the way the
>   project works and patchworked thinking like this is probably quite
>   wide-spread.
> 
>   But wouldn't it also be an option to have a big narrative? A single,
>   big text which starts with the beginnings and ends with an end?
>   Probably such a book would be more work. It is harder to write a
>   single text than to write a couple - especially if it is written by
>   several authors. But wouldn't this be nice?

I don't think that a big narrative would work, since the perspectives of
different participants differ too much. That's why we need a number of
personally signed chapters, in my opinion. Unless we want to equate Oekonux
== StefanMn's perspective or something, which would be somewhat boring in my
view...

>   Personally I'd strongly prefer a book for the general public. If
>   academics read it that's fine but in this case more average persons
>   are more important to me.

I agree. I also think that's an aspect where the ox book and the p2pF book
would differ.

>> Chapter 7: A complete social model
>> 
>> Content: How could a peer production society work - Siefkes' weighed
>> contributions, d-pool, stigmergic, etc. Other models?
>> 
>> Author: Christian Siefkes / Oekonux
> 
> Well, though I value Christian very much I think his concept is
> fundamentally flawed. As far as I can see there are some more people
> who think this way.

And while I value StefanMn I also think his approach of regarding the
generalization of peer production as a primarily technical problem is deeply
flawed (cf.
http://www.keimform.de/2009/04/01/notes-from-the-fourth-oekonux-conference-i/
), so we're very much in agreement here :-) But that doesn't matter, we can
easily present several social models in parallel. That's one of the reasons
why I think that a single big narrative wouldn't work.

>> Finally, I did not put in a chapter on organisation in peer
>> production or "peer governance" which I would be qualified to write
>> as this does not directly relate to capital - I'm not against it,
>> just thought it was a bit outside.
> 
> See above. I think the question of governance is very crucial -
> especially because it is structured very differently both from
> capitalism and from standard anarchist ideas.

I agree that such a chapter would be good to have.

Best regards
	Christian

-- 
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- [email protected] ---------
|   Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/   |   Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
|   Better Bayesian Analysis:           |   Peer Production Everywhere:
|   http://bart-project.com/            |   http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|------------------------------------------ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
The difference between theory and practice tends to be very small in
theory, but in practice it is very large indeed.

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