LES ‘PEER PRODUCTION STUDIES’: UN CHAMP DE RECHERCHE À CONSTRUIRE?

Séminaire du Centre Internet et SociétéCNRS, 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 OekonuxConference (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)

Production of scientific knowledge as moral

endeavour

‘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

structure of science’, in The sociology of science:

Theoretical and empirical investigations. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

● universalism

● disinterestedness

● organised scepticism

● communism (later changed: ‘communalism’)

A brief history of hacking

● 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

● Four Freedoms of Free Software 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

Yochai Benkler

'Coase’s penguin’The Wealth of Networks

Michel Bauwens

'The political economy of peer production’, P2P Foundation

Richard M. Stallman

Free Software FoundationGNU, GPL

Velasco González & Tkacz (2020) Chapter 18 – ‘Blockchain, or, Peer Production Without Guarantees’, Handbook of Peer Production.

‘Peer to Peer’

‘P2P’ term usage takes off in early

2000s

1. Mass practice (torrenting via

Napster)

2. Academic interest - Benkler:

“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-

actions

Duality of peer production

2000s quasi-utopian socio-technical

imaginary

● Oekonux, Michel Bauwens (P2PF),

A. Gorz, Autonomia: commons-

based peer production ‘germ form’

of society beyond exploitation and

domination

2020s torrenting criminalized out of

existence, in contrast to:

● FOSS - integrated into business

● How did integration happen?

commercial logic (paid labour)

communal logic(unpaid labour)

centralisedgovernance

firms;public service;

NGOs

consumption work; co-creation; prosumption

modulargovernance

independent workers; contractors; freelancers

domestic labour;voluntary / collectivist

organizations

O’Neil M (2015) Labour out of control: The political economy of capitalist and ethical organizations. OrganizationStudies 36 (12), 1627-1647

1) the life cycle of

an individual

technology or

community

2) the co-evolution

of hacker

movements and

relevant industries

or institutions

3) the position of

hacking within the

‘spirit of capitalism'

Delfanti, A & Söderberg J (2018) Repurposing the hacker: Three cycles of recuperation in the evolution of hacking and capitalism. Ephemera 18(3).

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.

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/OSS

FUNDING!?

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

Rank ProjectNumber of commits made by

firmsTotal number of commits

Proportion of commits made by

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 0.38

Number and proportion of commits made by firm employees to top-20 most active projects on GitHub

Size of commits

Field of peer production

studies?

1. Do we need a field?

2. ‘Network’ vs ‘Field’

Working assumption: division between

business oriented (how to improve firm

innovation and efficiency) and activist

(towards post-capitalism) perspectives

Name URL Activity

Journal of Peer Production http://peerproduction.net/ Research

P2P Foundation https://p2pfoundation.net/ Activism

David Bollier. News and perspectives on

the commons

http://www.bollier.org/ Activism

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

and the Political

https://heteropolitics.net/ Research

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

directory

http://directory.p2pvalue.eu/ Activism

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 Plastichttps://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).

Grow support systems for the

commons

● Climate crisis: need to

relocalise, degrow

● Recognise contributions (see

Fureai Kippu in Japan)

● Creation of Commons Policy

Council

Thanks!