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Governance in the P2P / Commons Age

Below, you will find a copy of an email from Tiberius Brastavicenau, the founder of Sensorica, a Montreal-based cosmo-local community involved in the production of open sensors, and has created a very elaborate open value accounting methodology. The basic idea is that this is a system in which everyone can log in his work or contribution on a common project, is peer reviewed and acknowledged, and then receives appropriate tokens that represent a percentage of the overall work done for a particular project.When income is generated for the common work, the contributions are then rewarded accordingly. This is a system which allows for the non-hierarchical coordination of common work.

‘Tibi’ is a good friend, whom I admire for his pioneering work in setting up fthis sophisticated tool to initiate open systems of peer production and value exchange, which predate similar attempts in the crypto economy.

In a contribution and text reproduced below, after my response, Tibi refers to a wikipedia entry on ‘P2P Social and Political Processes’ which references my older work on peer production and its governance mechanisms, and asks me specifically, if I still support ‘Multistakeholder Governance’ formats.

You may want to read it first, in order to understand the logic of my response.

I think this is a good occasion to re-specify and eventually update potential insights.

So peer production is the capacity for people to connect, self-organize and coordinate production and value exchange at a translocal level, using digital open ecosystems to coordinate their activities. These ecosystems, such as the systems for open source production as well as crypto-economic systems, are generally open and permissionless. This means that people can freely (as in free speech) join the common production project, and are not necessarily in a situation of wage dependency nor do they have to ask a priori permission to collaborate. Instead, contributions are verified by a layer of ‘maintainers’, who can protect the integrity of an ecosystem by refusing to accept contributions that are sub-par.

Thus, this type of permissionless and contributory peer governance, also requires new forms of ‘peer governance’: an alignment of the various contributors to the common work, usually called ‘poly-governance’ to distinguish it from market pricing mechanisms and/or hierarchical commands; peer production and governance in turn require a third element, i.e. ‘peer property’. These are specific protections so that the collective work cannot be privately appropriated. These new forms of ‘peer property’ take the form of ‘commons’, i.e. shared resources, that are collectively maintained, according to the own rules of particular communities.

The first iteration of such commons-based peer production was the joint creation of digital commons of knowledge, software and design. For example, the production of free software and open source code.

The second iteration was the dramatic expansion of urban commons projects which accelerated after the crisis of 2008. This concerns groups of citizens, mostly in cities but also in rural areas, which started mutualizing their provisioning systems, such as guaranteeing group access to organic food, creating cooperatives to jointly purchase renewable energy infrastructure, mutualized forms of co-working, makerspaces, cooperative grocery stores, authentic car sharing associations or cooperatives, and the like. We personally documented, a tenfold increase of such initiatives in the city of Ghent, from 2008 to 2016, but this is a generic phenomena, documented in other cities and regions. Such initiatives pre-existed the digital, but became hugely facilitated through the use of open digital networks, and our investigations showed many similar values and organizational forms.

The commonality between the open source formats and the urban commons is the value regime, i.e. the value is contributed to the commons; around such commons various entrepreneurs (often for-benefit initiatives) can then coalesce, creating added value for the market. And we noticed that to align the various contributory forces (the worker-contributors, the users, the entrepreneurs, etc..), these ecosystems of collaboration, most often create for-benefit associations. Think about the Linux Foundation for Linux, the Drupal Association, the Wikimedia Foundation. This is the dominant modality in the world of the digital itself, because it consists of shareable code, knowledge and design, which can be massively reproduced at low or marginal cost.

What we call multi-stakeholder governance can either refer to the informal alignment of various groups of collaborators, for example, users, code developers, participating companies, etc … Or it can exist as a formal structure, i.e. as the form taken by a cooperative legal entity.

In the urban commons, i.e.the commons-centric citizen initiatives that attempt to mutualize provisioning systems, the value regime is very similar, but not entirely, since we are here dealing more directly with material systems and commodity distribution. Whereas knowledge and software and design can be, once produced digitally, massively reproduced with literal extra costs, this is not the case for physical production ,where goods and services need to be purchased. In this case, specific reciprocity is required between partners in a transaction.

Quite often, we see that the entrepreneurial coalitions most often take the form of cooperatives, NGO’s, social entrepreneurs, social and solidarity economy formats. This includes the platform coops that are created to bring supply and demand together in one self-owned and self-governed platform.

So this is where my first preference for multistakeholder governance comes in: in these systems, various stakeholders need to be aligned, and the worker-owned model, which gives democratic governance rights to only one of the stakeholders seem inappropriate. Take a platform for ride-sharing for example, a cooperative version of the Uber model: everybody is probably familiar with taxi coops, which have existed for many decades, and yet, can still have an exploitative relationship with their paying customers. In such a context, we can easily see why it makes at least as much, if not more, sense, that the multiple parties involved have all a stake in the governance of such platforms.

When the commons economy scales at the full urban model, as in Italy, where cities have adopted regulations for the care and development of the urban commons project, we also see they have adopted multistaker governance models, such as the Quintuple Helix model. In this model, the city plays the role of the coordinating body, but in cooperation with the commercial, non-profit, and research sectors, all four being at the service of the fifth player, i.e. the commons-centric initiative of a group of citizens. So we see that both historically, this one one of the main findings of commons researcher Elinor Ostrom, multi-stakeholder alignment has bene one of the primary mechanisms to govern commons projects.

We have argued that the emergence of the open source model heralds a shift from commodity-based to contributory-based value models, since all participants and stakeholders rely on their commons-based infrastructure, and the market value is derivative from the continued contributions to the common pool.

Similarly, the governance models evolve to systems that can align and integrate multiple participating entities. So, generally speaking, ‘‘polycentric governance’ is not a bug, but a generic feature of most commons projects.

Now imagine that such collaborations are not just local, but prefiguratively represent <the> new value model for a whole society, which in turn becomes contributory.

Indeed, as the importance of commons-based peer production models grows, we also believe this prefigures a new type of political economy:

In which civil society becomes productive, and recognized as such, through the contributions of the citizens to commons-centric initiatives In which entrepreneurs become inter-dependent towards their commons-based infrastructures; this creates the issue of whether these entrepreneurs extract value from the commons in such a manner that the commons are weakened and exhausted, or whether these forms can be generative towards the commons. We have argued that entrepreneurs that work collaboratively and generatively around joint commons, become ‘entre-donneurs’, ‘giving in between, rather than ‘taking in between’. Just as we can see that the for-benefit associations do not command the production, but make it possible (the Wikimedia Foundation maintains the common infrastructure for Wikipedia, but does not command the production of articles), so we can infer from that a new model for common governance of the public sphere. The Partner State is a form for the governance of public authority in which it ‘enables and empowers the self-organization of society and individuals’.

A third iteration of peer production, emerging after the open source and urban commons model, has been the emergence of the crypto economy: the creation of open ecosystems for economic collaboration that are based on tokens and cryptocurrencies, but also on retaining the usage of open source software and strong community dynamics. While open source modes of production enabled the global mutual coordination of labor, outside of the nexus of the state and corporations, crypto economics in addition allows for the payment of such work. Crypto-based projects, for example in the form of DAOs (Distributed Autonomous Organizations, are self-infrastructuring organizations, which have been able to fund their own commons, through mechanisms for funding ‘public goods’.

In the open source model, market-facing contributors could more easily create income than those working for the general benefit of the network as a whole. This made open source systems vulnerable to the influence of larger software companies, who funded, and therefore unduly influenced, the core of the commons’ contributors. The crypto system is more distributed, and creates tokenized income for contributors to the common infrastructure.

Generally speaking, as you can read in the extensive study, Blockchain Technology and Polycentric Governance, indicates. Crypto systems are equally poly-centric in their institutional models that aim to align various stakeholder groups. They do this by applying game-theoreric incentives, based on using tokens to rewards contributions, and binding their payments through smart contracts.

Now, if contributory peer production, and the evolving poly-centric models of blockchain-based DAO’s are prefigurative of an emerging societal model, must that mean that the government of human societies, will also be based on multi-stakeholder governance. I believe this is the question asked by Tiberius (see below).

I have indicated the following:

I believe that the state model will move from the production-consumption model still evident as the paradigm of both the welfare state and neoliberal models, will evolve to become partner states. This means an evolution of the nation-state, and other potential models as yet to emerge, will have to be adapted so that they can become supportive of individual and collective autonomy. I also believe that the market sector will have to become a regenerative sector, i.e. required to contribute to the welfare and reproduction of life systems, rather than undermining them. We could call this a regenerative market sector. Finally I believe that civil society will become recognized as being fully productive itself.

My point is that, even if we are able to create and organize trans-local spaces, to create CoordiNations, network nations or network states, even then, we will have to live geographically just as much. The institutional form that such living together will take, will evolve and change, but there is no doubt in my mind that geographical administration of common affairs will persist to some, probably substantial degree. And such governance can take various forms.

Equally likely, is the combination of sovereign forms, i.e. agreements between geographically-based entities, and trans-locally based entities.

Will the translocal create its own entities, even sovereign entities. Yes that is likely.

Tiberius and others have introduced the idea of Fourth Sector Organizations. These are ‘cosmo-local’ entities that combine local physical production of goods and services and trans-nationsal institutions and practices of knowledge sharing and governance. So in such an entity, market organizations, public organizations and nonprofit entities can collaborate, along with independent contributions, at a higher level of integration.

My own concept of Magisteria of the Commons is quite similar. My argument is that we have a commons gap in our global institutional order. We have inter-national governmental cooperation, we have trans-national financial flows, but we do not have transnational civic institutions that are able to project the web of life and the dwindling resource base of the planet. I strongly suspect these Magisteria will evolve various forms of multi-stakeholder governance, but with participation of the productive citizens directly. This is emphatically not an iteration of the WEF model.

These options for me represent a third way, between the western drift towards transnational domain-specific multi-stakeholder organizations, as promoted by the WEF, but which are dominated by transnational finance, invite in technocratic NGOs, but do not have a representation of the autonomous civic world of peer production communities.

Similarly, the Russia-China axis, and the BRICS countries aligning with them, want to reinforce nation-state control again.

So to be clear, my own proposals do not represent an endorsement of neither the neo-sovereignism proposed by Russia or China, or the un-democratic and technocratic multi-stakeholderism of the WEF.

I simply notice how open source communities, urban commons, and the crypto world, evolve their own governance mechanisms, and that aligning various stakeholders around common goals, plays a big part. This polycentric governance is entirely in line with historical commons.

In the open source model, we find a combination of stigmergic self-organization, managed for quality control by a layer of maintainers, aligned businesses, and a kind of ‘state of the commons’, i.e. democratic organizations which allow various stakeholders to negotiate within the for-benefit associations that manage the alignment of various forces, usually through democratic mechanisms.

By contrast, the crypto world takes a more radical techno-cratic stand, using game theoretic models to align behaviour through token issuance, and using qualified voting mechanisms such as quadratic voting.

I believe we are evolving towards a complex adaptation of various contextual governance systems: polycentric governance models.

This is not historically unprecedented: think about the thousand year existence of the very complex Holy Roman Empire, which combined very local governance with multiple models; the existence of agreements at different levels, i.e. medieval charters could be seen as an earlier iteration of smart contrasts, with an elected monarchy that kept the overall integration of the system. Direct democracy in independent cities, coupled with leagues of merchant cities, coupled with feudal-type states, and church-controlled land and religious congregations. The system was not conflict free, but not chaotic, and maintained social order and cultural integration over a very long period.

Obviously, like any system, it can be recuperated and co-opted, but commons are by definition self-government, and dispose of a panoply of self-governance mechanisms not just to defend themselves, but to grow and expand. Many of the examples of co-opted projects cited by Tiberius, were never commons in the first place. They used the language of sharing and cooperation with ulterior motives of extraction.

It is not clear to me what Tiberius counter-proposals consist of, and what the modalities are that he proposed as alternatives to the democratic and autonomous alignment of various stakeholders in complex systems.

The conflation of the polycentric governance models of the commons, both historical and contemporary, are entirely his, and are not related to my own work, which is an analysis of emergent practice.

Tiberius Brastaviceanu writes:

The Wikipedia page on Social p2p Processes quotes Michel Bauwens. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_peer-to-peer_processes

The quotation comes from an old blog post, I believe that it was published in 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20110722003910/http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=133

From my understanding, it reads that Michel would agree that Stakeholder Governance would be an appropriate model for state-level and perhaps even global governance.

Reading that blog post and knowing Michel for a long time now, this may fit with the three-party governance model: partner State, private sector and the Commons. Stakeholder governance would be something in between direct democracy and representative democracy, where power is shared among these 3 pillars through stakeholders from each sector, to represent the interest of actors in each sector. Whatever that is, it's not peer governance, but I understand that Michel was describing a possible near future rearrangement of the power structure within Nation States.

First, I wonder if Michel holds the same view or if the view on governance has changed.

From my perspective, back in 2011 we didn't clearly see this transnational space opening and what we now call the 4th sector. In essence, the commons and all p2p was put into the 3rd sector, the cooperative, solidarity economy / civil society. But as we see now, p2p has grown into something different: organizational model, property regime, governance, ...

Second, when you click on Stakeholder Governance you get to another page that is, to some extend, hijacked by the World Economic Forum. Pretty high up on that page it is stated that the WEF is the main proponent of this global governance model and the largest body where this governance model is actually applied. There is there a relation, an indirect association that one can make, between Michel's views and the WEF. One could conclude that Michel endorses Stakeholder Capitalism as proposed by the WEF. In fact, as we experience accaparation of the p2p movement by all traditional factions, I really wonder if these relations were put in there purposefully, to direct flows and form associations between p2p and the WEF agenda. I believe that p2p is a new thing and people experience it today mixed with all sorts of things, as everyone tries to co-opt it and adapt to it at the same time. We're seeing a lot of hybrid models and there's a lot of ambiguity and it is our duty to disambiguate, since we see it probably better thsn others.

So remember the so-called sharing economy? It turned out to be platform capitalism, an adaptation of capitalism to the new possibilities of Web2.0, by incorporating some parts of the p2p nescent culture, so they branded it as sharing. Many of us saw the wolf inside the sheep's skin and called it out. I remember protesting the presence of Airbnb at the Ouishare Fest in Paris in 2014. Some people thought that I was crazy. The same way I called out crowdsourcing services like Taskrabbit, which were branded like collaborative platforms. https://multitudeproject.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-i-dont-like-crowdsourcing.html?m=1

The cooptation of the p2p movement has not stopped. Another example, from web2 to web3, platform capitalism is now evolving into the platform state, branded as The Network State, coming out of the same place, Silicon Valley. They scream p2p and open source everywhere, and it's true, but there's a new catch, it's not p2p as we see it, just a more sophisticated form of control built on higher levels of value, which are invisible for the great majority of people.