Category:Peergovernance
"Peer production, peer governance, peer property",
Excerpt of Article by Michel Bauwens - link : http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=87
"Peer to peer social processes are bottom-up processes whereby agents in a distributed network can freely engage in common pursuits, without external coercion. It is important to realize that distributed systems differ from decentralized systems, essentially because in the latter, the hubs are obligatory, while in the former, they are the result of voluntary choices. Distributed networks do have constraints, internal coercion, that are the conditions for the group to operate, and they may be embedded in the technical infrastructure, the social norms, or legal rules.
P2P social processes more precisely engender:
1) Peer Production: wherever a group of peers decided to engage in the production of a common resource
2) Peer Governance: the means they choose to govern themselves while they engage in such pursuit
3) Peer Property: the institutional and legal framework they choose to guard against the private appropriation of this common work; this usually takes the form of non-exclusionary forms of universal common property"
The approach of the P2P Foundation
- Michel Bauwens: Peer Governance as a Third Mode of Governance
- Michel Bauwens: The Triune Peer Governance of the Digital Commons
Additional theses on peer governance by John Heron
1. There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:
- autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;
- narrow democratic cultures which practice political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;
- wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;
- commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavor.”
2. These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.
- Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;
- Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;
- Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;
- The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor
Strong Recommendations by Michel Bauwens
- This hybrid governance proposal by Forrest Landry corresponds to my own learnings and intuitions on how to govern peer production processes:
- consensus is best for small groups but requires very long processing time and inhibits fast and adaptable action when necessary
- hence the autonomy of the executive process must be protected (deliberation is split from action)
- but the meritocratic autonomy of action easily leads to autocratic abuse of separating leaderships, hence democratic processes are paramount as counter-balance, as a key part of the anti-oligarchic protocols every organization must think about
- Read more about the Small Group Method based on the Structural Archetypes for Group Organization from Forrest Landry
- Data is crucial for the successor civilization but ownership is the wrong paradigm. This is the idea behind the Data Coalitions proposal of Matt Prewitt. [1]
Introductory Material
- Felix Stadler insists: The Governance of Peer Production is Meritocratic, not Egalitarian
- The Immaterial Aristocracy of the Internet], a meditation on the humans behind Protocollary Power, by Harry Halpin.
- Manuel De Landa: Hierarchies and Meshworks are always mixed ; Full article
- Be aware of the Architectures of Control in the Digital Environment, such as DRM and Trusted Computing.
- Pierre de Vries on Governance through Principles instead of rules [2]
- Interview: Clay Shirky on the New Style of Peer Leadership
- Three Levels of FOSS Governance
- Bradley Kuhn of Free Software Communities vs. Open Source Companies
- Christopher Allen: The numbers that matter for governing communities: Personal Circle; Group Tresholds and Power Laws
- Simon Phipps analyses the four minimum rules of a Open-by-Rule Community
- Affordances of Blockchain Technologies With Regards To Commons Governance
Typology
The entries in the directory below covers different aspects which should be distinguished from each other
- The forms of peer governance of open/free communities and peer production groups. See A Model of a Mature Open Source Project for a case study of the Plone community.
- Informal leadership models that are pragmatically used to govern such projects: what is the nature of leadership and hierarchy in peer production?
- See Hierarchy, Leadership, Benevolent Dictator, and search for these concepts as well as "Authority" in the wiki's search box.
- The use of formal management models.
- The use of legal formats such as Foundations to formalize leadership of the infrastructure that enables the common production to occur.
- Formal legislative process in government and political parties. Apart from non-representational self-governance models in the small teams responsible for peer production, whenever the allocation of scarce resources need to takes place, 'peer-informed' representational models will arise.
- See for an example, the Green Party Integrated Consensus-Consent-Voting Model
- Informal leadership models that are pragmatically used to govern such projects: what is the nature of leadership and hierarchy in peer production?
- The methods of production used in peer production: how is the work actually done?
- The tools used in the production process (ie. Bitkeeper, CVS, etc.)
- The design of interactions at the level of the product/technological architecture (modularity, encapsulation, information hiding)
- Governance of the infrastructures needed by the Online Creation Communities
- According to Mayo Fuster Morell, five main models of online infrastructure provision can be distinguished: 1) Corporation services, 2) mission enterprises, 3) university networks, 4) representational foundations and 5) assemblearian collective self-provision
A proposed institutional framework for governing the commons at all scales
- In the book, The Power of Neighborhood and the Commons, author PM makes the following proposals:
Typology of Commons Regulation
things | Access | Regulation |
Res nullius | all | non-regulated |
Res privatae | owner | market-regulated |
Res publicae | public | state-regulated |
Res communes | community | peer-regulated |
For Historical Inspiration
- Athenian Democracy ; Foundations of Athenian Democracy
- Iroquois Confederacy ; Anishinaabe Council of Three Fires; (to check: Indigenous African Institutions
- European Medieval Democracy
- Viking Democracy
- Pirate Governance
- Paris Commune
Characteristics of the Blockchain that favor Commons-Based Governance
1. Antonio Tenorio-Fornes et al. :
"Six affordances (Hutchby, 2001), which constitute functional and relational aspects that frame the potentialities of self-organized collectives for agentic action, with regards to blockchain-based tools for commons governance (Rozas et al., 2021b, 8–20):
I. Tokenization: refers to the process of transforming the rights to perform an action on an asset into a transferable data element, a token, on the blockchain.
II. Self-enforcement and formalization of rules: refer to the process of embedding organizational rules in the form of smart contracts. As a result, firstly, there is an affordance for the self-enforcement of communitarian rules, such as those which regulate the monitoring and graduated sanctions in these communities. Secondly, this encoding of rules implies explicitation, since blockchain technologies require these rules to be defined in ways that are unambiguously understood by machines.
III. Autonomous automatization: refers to the process of defining complex sets of smart contracts as DAOs, which may enable multiple parties to interact with each other, even without human interaction. This is partially analogous to software communicating with other software today, but in a decentralized manner, and with higher degrees of software autonomy.
IV. Decentralization of power over the infrastructure: refers to the process of communalizing the ownership and control of the technological tools employed by the community through the decentralization of the infrastructure they rely on, such as the collaboration platforms (and their servers) employed for coordination.
V. Increasing transparency: refers to the process of opening the organizational processes and the associated data by relying on the persistence and immutability properties of blockchain technologies.
VI. Codification of trust: refers to the process of codifying a certain degree of trust into systems which facilitate agreements between agents without requiring a third party, such as the federal agreements which might be established among different groups that form part of such communities.
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440211002526)
2. Sascha:
"When governance power is determined purely by capital, decision making is centralised, and the rich get richer. Those who aren’t whales are poorly represented in governance decisions, and there is no way to hold important stakeholders accountable to the desires of the broader community, or the past expectations they have bought into.
On the flip side, attracting capital is critical to the success and sustainability of tokenised communities. Decisions backed by skin-in-the-game are key to ensuring that those who don’t have any interest in the long-term success of a community can’t unduly influence how resources are allocated, and/or which policies are enacted.
So how do we balance these opposing forces, and create a more effective and aligned community?"
(https://gardens.substack.com/p/introducing-gardens)
Quotes
"Participants to open “organizations” should learn to swap the order of events: from “membership then participation” to “participation then membership”. This mental shift is probably the hardest and most important one, as it is the only way in which open “organizations” will be able to grow. Binary membership structures and its impact on our activities is so common and widespread that is even hard to notice, but it is around most of the things that we do. From learning at school to working at a company or participating in our local or national communities. In almost all occasions the order is clear: first you become a member of one organization (with an associated role), then you start interacting with it."
- Pepo Ospina [3]
Key Resources
Key Articles and Essays
- * Jordan Hall: Four Problem-Solving Methods in the History of Humanity, up to the 'DAO moment'
- A New Way of Measuring Openness: The Open Governance Index. Liz Laffan. TIM Review, January 2012 [4]. A way to measure the degree of real Peer Governance of any project (particularly for Open Source Software companies).
- Identifying and understanding the problems of Wikipedia’s peer governance: The case of inclusionists versus deletionists. by Kostakis, Vasilis. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 3 - 1 March 2010 [6]
- Managing Boundaries between Organizations and Communities: Comparing Creative Commons and Wikimedia. Paper prepared for the 3rd Free Culture Research Conference, October 8-9, 2010, Berlin. By Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack. [7] : The general question we are addressing is: How do organizations in digital information economy manage the boundaries to related focal communities?
- Sustainability and Governance in Developing Open Source Projects as Processes of In-Becoming. Daniel Curto-Millet. Technology Innovation Management Review, January 2013. [9]
- Commercial Providers of Infrastructure for Collective Action Online. Case studies comparison: Flickr Corporation model and Wikihow Enterprise model. By Mayo Fuster Morell. For the 3rd Free culture research conference Berlin, October 2010 [10]: Based on the case of online creation communities, the paper presents the two main models of commercial providers of infrastructure: corporate service model and mission enterprise model. It also presents an explanatory analysis of how the type of provider shape the community generated. The empirical analysis is based of a case study comparison of Flickr and Wikihow.
- The Rise of Organizational Complexity, see: Y. Bar-Yam, Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile, Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS UNESCO Publishers, Oxford, UK, 2002); also NECSI Report 1997-12-01 (1997). [11]
- THREE THESES ON ORGANISATION: Lessons of the 2011 mobilizations. By Roberto Nunez.
Examples
Open Value Network peer Governance - from the OVN wiki
Key Books
- Cyberchiefs. Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes. Mathieu O’Neil. Macmillan/Pluto Press, 2009.
- Protocol by Alexander Galloway, discusses the nature of power in distributed networks.
- The Success of Open Source, by Steve Webber, discusses the governance of free software and open sorce software projects in detail.
- Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks. By Rodrigo Nunes. PML Books (Mute / Post-Media Lab), 2014. [12]: "Rejecting the dichotomy of centralism and horizontalism that has deeply marked millennial politics, Rodrigo Nunes’ close analysis of network systems demonstrates how organising within contemporary social and political movements exists somewhere between – or beyond – the two."
- Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic. By Camila Vergara. Princeton University Press, 2020. [13]: "This provocative book reveals how the majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers. Systemic Corruption argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the actions of corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative systems. Camila Vergara provides a compelling and original genealogy of political corruption from ancient to modern thought, and shows how representative democracy was designed to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful to the detriment of the majority."
Visualisations
Pages in category "Peergovernance"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 971 total.
(previous page) (next page)F
G
- Gadaa System of the Oromo People
- Gaming Guilds
- Gardens and its Protocols for Peergovernance
- Gasteiz en transición/es
- General Assembly
- Generative vs. Extractive
- Genesis DAO
- George Dafermos
- George Dafermos on the Peer Governance of Open Source Projects
- Global Commons Governance Instead of World Leaders
- Global Commons Trust
- Global Commonwealth of Citizens
- Global Politics of Internet Governance
- Global Tribes
- Glomo
- GNOME Foundation
- GNOME Foundation - Governance
- GNOME Foundation Is All About People
- GNU Compiler Collection - Governance
- Good Leadership in Social Movement Organizations
- Gordian Principles for the Self-Sovereign Control of Digital Assets
- Govbase
- Governable Stacks
- Governance and Decision-Making Tools
- Governance by Algorithms
- Governance By Plutocracy Is Simply Not a Sustainable Way of Running a DAO
- Governance by User Groups
- Governance Equation
- Governance Features of Social Enterprise and Social Network Activities of Collective Food Buying Groups
- Governance Holarchy
- Governance of Online Creation Communities
- Governance of Online Creation Communities for the Building of Digital Commons
- Governance of Open Source Communities
- Governance of Open Source Software Foundations
- Governance of Peer Production is Meritocratic, not Egalitarian
- Governance of Shared Assets
- Governance of Social Media Spaces
- Governance of Sponsored Open Source Communities
- Governance of the Data Commons
- Governance of Volunteer-Driven Open Resource Communities
- Governance Structures for Social Movements
- Governance Systems Based on Idea and Action Amplification
- Governance Systems of the First Australians
- Governing Differences in Online Peer Communities Through Dissensus Protocols
- Governing Many Worlds
- Grafitos Workers Council - Venezuela
- Greg Lastowka on Virtual Justice and the New Laws of Online Worlds
- Group Pattern Language
- Guarantee Society
- Guilds
- Gustavo Arellano on the Anti-Government, Anti-Cartel Autonomous Towns of Mexico
H
- Hacking and Power
- Harmonization Governance
- Hastily Formed Networks
- Hierarchy eBook
- Hierarchy in Decentralized Networks
- Hierarchy in Distributed Networks
- Hierarchy in the Forest
- Highest Poverty
- Holacracy
- Holographic Consensus
- Holoptism
- Honeybee Democracy
- Horizontal Decision-Making
- Horizontal Hope
- Horizontal Subsidiarity
- Horizontalism and Grassroots Democracy in the Americas
- How Firms Relate to Open Source Communities
- How Indigenous Communities in Guatemala Are Successfully Managing Their Community Forest
- How Network Governance Adds Value
- How the German Pirate Party's Liquid Democracy Has Democratized Internal Party Politics
- How the New Institutional Economics of Distributed Ledger Technology Disrupt Governance
- How the NYC General Assembly Works
- How to Grow Distributed Leadership
- How To Occupy
- How to Reconcile Participation and Representation
- Human Methods Lab on What Loomio Does
- Human Microphone System
- Human Sovereignty
- Hypermediation
I
- IBM and Linux
- ICON Republic of Blockchains
- ID3 Workshop on Trust Frameworks and Self-Governance
- Ida Benedetto on Ritual and Time Design for Decentralized Communities
- Ideas on Artificial intelligences and Political Organization as Inspired by the Science Fiction of Iain Banks
- Identifying and Understanding the Problems of Wikipedia’s Peer Governance
- Igbo Women's Councils
- Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities
- Inclusive Governance and Generative Value in Knowledge Commons
- Inclusive Participation
- Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance
- Indigenous Peoples and Community Conserved Territories and Areas
- Indymedia - Governance
- Institutional Resilience in Non Conventional Economic Systems
- Institutions of Open Source
- Integral Philosophy
- Integral Theory of Democracy
- Integrated Water Resources Management 2.0
- Intentional Communities
- Internal Economic Organization of the Jesuit Missions among the Guarani
- Internet Governance
- Internet Governance for Dummies
- Internet Governance Forum
- Internet Governance Project
- Internet – History
- Internet-Native Squads
- Interview with Matt Asay of 10gen on Open Source Sustainability
- Introduction to Classic Sociocracy and Dynamic Governance
- Introduction to the Auroville Community
- Invisible Politics and Governance of Bitcoin
- Iroquois Confederacy
- Iroquois League
- Is the Decision-Making of the Occupy Movement Bureaucratic
- Isabel Carlisle
- Issues of Power and the Problems with Deliberative Democracy
- Italian Precarious Workers Between Self-Organization and Self-Advocacy
J
- James Priest
- James Priest on Collaboration at Scale
- James Quilligan on Covenants for Inclusive Stewardship of the Commons
- Janelle Orsi on the Eight Principles for Commons Based Legal Structures
- Jean-Paul Faguet on Decentralization, Popular Democracy and Governance from Below in Bolivia
- Jean-Paul Faguet on Governance from Below or Decentralization in Bolivia
- Jeff Emmett and Michael Zargham on Using Commons Stack for Decentralized Organizations and Token Economies
- Jeri Ellsworth on Problems with the Flat Management at Valve
- Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy
- Jim Zemlin on the Importance of Foundations for Collaborative Technological Development and Economics
- Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia's Governance
- Johannes Heinrichs' Theory of a Four-Chambers Democracy
- Jonathan Logan on Temporary Autonomous Zones
- Jos Poortvliet on Open Governance Rules Done Right
- Joshua Vial on the Decentralized Practices That Inspired Enspiral
- Justice-Based Leadership
- Justice-Based Management
K
L
- LabGov Co-Governance Project
- Labour Managed Firms
- LaFábrika-detodalavida/es
- Lakabe/es
- Land Sovereignty
- Landcare Movement - Germany
- Lands of Sheraga
- Law and Economics of Pirate Tolerance
- Leaderful Charisma
- Leaderless Resistance
- Leaderless Revolution
- Leaderless Swarm
- Leadership
- Leadership at Open Source Protests
- Leadership in Communities of Practice
- Legal Service For Commons
- Liminal Social Drama
- Linux and the Management of Decentralized Networks
- Liquid Democracy and the Futures of Governance
- Liquid Feedback
- Liquid Holacracy Governance Model
- Liquid Organization Model
- LiquidO
- List of e-Voting, Deliberation, and e-Democracy Projects
- Loomio
- Lorea/es
- Low Profit Limited Liability Companies
M
- Maintainer Model of Management
- Managing Boundaries between Organizations and Communities
- Managing the Boundary of an Open Project
- Manufacturing Partnership
- Mapping the Frontiers of Governance in Social Media
- Market-Protocol Fit in Decentralized Institutions
- Maroon Communities
- Masterclass on Commons Governance by Michel Bauwens
- Materialist Governance of Bitcoin and the Blockchain
- Mayo Fuster Morell on the Governance Model of the Wikimedia Foundation
- Meaning Organization
- Measuring Openess of Online Platforms
- Measuring Openness
- Measuring Social Power Around Three Axes
- Merchant Fraternities in the Middle Ages
- Meritocratic Governance Model
- Meritocratic Leadership
- Meta-Formation
- Meta-Networks
- Metagovernance
- Metagovernment
- MethodKit
- Methods of Decision-Making
- Micah Daigle on Collective Decision-Making in an Age of Networks
- Michael Hardt on the Networked Leadership of the New Social Movements
- Michael Madison on the History of Governing Knowledge Commons
- Michel Bauwens and Manuela Zechner on Commons Governance
- Michel Bauwens on Commoning Governance
- Michel Bauwens on Protocollary Power and Corporate Internet Platforms
- Micro-Collectives
- Mikorizal Software
- Model Distributed Collaborative Organizations