"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:

(1) autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;

(2) 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.;

(3) wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;

(4) 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.

(1) Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;

(2) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;

(3) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;

(4) 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

Introduction

• 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 [1]
• 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
• In a P2P context, we may want to replace or augment Personality Driven Governance Systems by Governance Systems Based on Idea and Action Amplification (i.e. Governance by User Groups). More from Heather Marsh at: How a Stigmergy of Actions Replaces Representation of Persons.

Typology

The entries in the directory below covers different aspects which should be distinguished from each other

1. 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.
   1. 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.
   2. The use of formal management models.
      • See Chaordic Organizations - Characteristics , Consensus , Consent vs. Consensus , Coordination Format , Council Ceremony , Harmonization Governance , Heterarchy , Holacracy , Horizontal Accountablity , Leaderless Organizations , Open Organization , Sociocracy
   3. The use of legal formats such as Foundations to formalize leadership of the infrastructure that enables the common production to occur.
      • See Burning Man - Governance , Free Software Foundation , FLOSS - Governance , FLOSS Foundations , GNOME Foundation , Mozilla Foundation, OpenBSD Foundation
   4. 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
2. The methods of production used in peer production: how is the work actually done?
   1. The tools used in the production process (ie. Bitkeeper, CVS, etc.)
   2. The design of interactions at the level of the product/technological architecture (modularity, encapsulation, information hiding)
3. Governance of the infrastructures needed by the Online Creation Communities
   1. 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

Typology of Commons Regulation

• Source: The Commons: Year One of the Global Commons Movement by Silke Helfrich (29. Januar 2011)

For Historical Inspiration

1. Athenian Democracy ; Foundations of Athenian Democracy
2. Iroquois Confederacy‎‎ ; Anishinaabe Council of Three Fires; (to check: Indigenous African Institutions
3. European Medieval Democracy
4. Viking Democracy
5. Pirate Governance
6. Paris Commune

Key Resources

1. Bibliography on non-hierarchical self-organisation

Key Articles and Essays

• A New Way of Measuring Openness: The Open Governance Index. Liz Laffan. TIM Review, January 2012 [2]. A way to measure the degree of real Peer Governance of any project (particularly for Open Source Software companies).

• Open Process as the Organizational Spirit of the Internet Model Toni Prug. [3]

• The Open Enterprise Manifesto

• 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 [4]

• 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. [5] : The general question we are addressing is: How do organizations in digital information economy manage the boundaries to related focal communities?

• Brokerage, Boundary Spanning, and Leadership in Open Innovation Communities [6]

• Sustainability and Governance in Developing Open Source Projects as Processes of In-Becoming. Daniel Curto-Millet. Technology Innovation Management Review, January 2013. [7]

• 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 [8]: 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). [9]

• THREE THESES ON ORGANISATION: Lessons of the 2011 mobilizations. By Roberto Nunez.

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. [10]: "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."

Visualisations

• 

  Solidarity Economy visualisation