Re: [ox-en] Democracy and peer production

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Hi Stefan, Diego and all,

To begin with, it is important to highlight that those opinions were
articulated almost two years ago i.e., I don't think the same now, having
studied, observed and experienced peer production more in depth. Also, I
would like to apologise in advance if my thoughts are vague or irrelevant;
I suppose that the openness of this list allows such an "irrelevance" :-)

I believe, in a nutshell, that peer governance is a new mode of governance
and bottom-up mode of participative decision-making that is being
experimented in peer projects, such as Wikipedia or FLOSS. Thus peer
governance is the way that peer production, the process in which common
value is produced, is managed. Peer governance’s main characteristics are
the equipotentiality, i.e. the fact that in a peer project all the
participants have an equal ability to contribute, although that not all the
participants have the same skills and abilities; the heterarchy as a form of
community; and the holoptism i.e. the ability for any part to know the
whole.

Building upon Dafermos (2003) and Bauwens (2007), I cite here a passage
where I discuss peer governance and democracy:

Dafermos  submits that peer governance induces the engagement in
decision-making process leading to new forms of socio-political organisation
being shaped by mass participation, collaboration and direct involvement in
the decision-making process. Bauwens  highlights that it is important
to distinguish the peer governance, in projects where a multitude of
relatively small but coordinated global groups manages its production
through co-decision and non-representative mechanisms, from the
representative democracy. Democracy is a decentralized form of decision
making and power sharing premised on elections and representatives. Thus,
Bauwens  concludes that “since society is not a peer group with an a priori
consensus, but rather a decentralized structure of competing groups,
representative democracy cannot be replaced by peer governanceâ€. However, he
 claims that peer governance and representative democracy can influence and
accommodate each other. Peer governance till now functions in the immaterial
field of abundance (in contrast to the material field where the resources
are of a scarce nature, knowledge, information and culture are resources in
abundance) and consequently there is no need for market, hierarchy or
democratic mechanisms as a form of governance to allocate scarce resources.
Even in some prominent peer projects, such as the Wikipedia, the Mozilla
foundation or the Apache foundation where there are some fixed costs (for
example servers), some people will manage the infrastructure of cooperation
on behalf of the project’s community. And, as Bauwens  observes: “because
they have scarce resources, you need the democratic structureâ€. Furthermore,
Bauwens  supposes that as peer projects evolve beyond a certain scale and
start facing problems of decisions concerning scarce resources, will
probably embrace some representational mechanisms.  He speculates that:

"Representative and bureaucratic decision-making can and will in some places
be replaced by global governance networks which may be self-governed to a
large extent, but in any case, it will and should incorporate more and more
multistakeholder models, which strives to include as participants in
decision-making, all groups that could be affected by such actions. This
group-based partnership model is different, but related in spirit, to the
individual-based peer governance, because they share an ethos of
participation."

And last but not least, investigating the battle between inclusionists vs
deletionists in Wikipedia (as part of a recent thesis of mine) it can be
seen how the principles of peer governance are threatened while some lessons
are taught for peer governance:

Wikipedia’s mode of governance is an unfinished artifact as well: it follows
the constant reform and refinement of social norms within the
community. However, the open participation in combination with an increasing
number of participants makes the situation more complex (O’ Neil, 2009): by
examining the battle between inclusionists and deletionists, it was
understood that Wikipedia’s lack of a clearly defined constitution, or what
Kort (interview with Kort, 2009) calls Community Social Contract Model,
breeds the danger for local jurisdictions over which a small number
of participants start writing rules that conflicting with others (O’ Neil,
2009), and so the sustainability of the peer project is threatened. Thus, it
can be argued that the degree of openness in every aspect of a peer
project’s governance should be questioned and closely
investigated. Moreover, during conflicts, such as in this thesis’ case
study, the persistent, well-organized minorities – most of the times being
adept at the function of the platform – can adroitly handle it and dominate
their opponents. It is obvious that the values of communal evaluation and
equipotentiality are being subverted by such practices. As Hilbert (2004, p.
120) notices group polarization, a phenomenon that can be found in the
processes of inclusionists vs deletionists battle, is a significant danger
that open, virtual communities face: “discourse among like-minded people can
very quickly lead to group polarization … which causes opinions to diverge
rather than converge… [so], it is very probable that the strongest
groups will dominate the common lifeâ€. In addition, echoeing O’ Neil (2009),
in incidents such as the examined case or others where administrators banned
other participants, transparency and holoptism are in danger: decisions are
being made on secret lists and power is being accumulated; authority,
corruption, hidden hierarchies and secrecy sometimes subvert the main
foundations of peer governance i.e. openness, heterachy,
meritocracy, transparency and holoptism, setting the very essence of
Wikipedia,  i.e its innovative and emancipatory governance mechanism which
distinguishes it from, say, Britannica, in a serious danger. Peer governance
is a suitable mode to govern infinite sources, working more effectively in
abundance (interview with Bauwens, 2009). This constitutes the main argument
why Wikipedia should return to its inclusionist roots, while a functional,
scrupulous and scientifically designed resolution process for resolving
content disputes and an unambiguous community social contract model have to
be implemented.

Sorry for the long email (maybe as Stefan put it: "this thread comes in
handy to discuss this further") and for having (?) derailed the discussion.

Best,

V.

--

Vasilis Kostakis

Web: http://aopapa.gr/kostakis/
Tel: +306972326545


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