Voluntary Leadership
Voluntary Hierarchy
URL = http://felix.openflows.org
Description
Felix Stalder on Open Source Projects as Voluntary Hierarchies. From a review of the book by Weber, Steven (2004) The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP
"More interesting and original is the chapter on the macro-organization of FOSS projects. Here, Weber shows that these projects are not chaotic at all, but tend to have explicit formal structures (release schedules, project leaders, official repositories, etc) and that notions of self-organization do not really clarify much. To bring together the two basic observations that all contributions are voluntary, and that projects are hierarchically structured, Weber develops the notion of a voluntary hierarchy (though, he never quite calls it that). In such a governance system, individuals voluntarily accept their position in a hierarchy, because they realize that doing so is beneficial to them. Their own contributions get recognized and the overall project develops into a direction that they like. In such as system, contrary to what we usually think of hierarchies, power flows from the bottom to the top 'because the lead depends on the followers more than the other way around Asymmetrical interdependencies favor the potential followers, who will make a free and voluntary choice where to invest their work' (p.160).
The freedom of choice if and where to contribute is not just based on the fact that all contributions are voluntary, but also, perhaps even more importantly, on the ability to fork the project, to reorganize the project under a different leadership. This happens if contributors believe that the current leader no longer supports their own individual goals. If a significant number of contributors share this sense of disaffection, the project splits, or routs around the unpopular leader. Given the free access to the source code, all the resources to form a new project are there.
The only thing that is needed is the credible claim of another leader to be more responsive to the community. The hurdle for forking is, as Weber argues, simultaneously very low and very high. It is so low that it forces the leader to stay attentive and responsive to the community. The Utopian vision that 'authority follows and derives from responsibility' (p.163) comes to be realized to a reasonable degree. The fact that forks happen quite rarely shows that the hurdle, in practice, is nevertheless high enough to allow for a high degree of project continuity. As projects mature and grow in complexity, governance structures are becoming more explicit (foundations, board of directors, etc) without replacing the essentially voluntary nature of the hierarchy.
For Weber, the reason why the political economy of FOSS works is because the main task of such production processes is no longer to organize the division of labor (as it was with industrialism) but distributed innovation. The latter cannot be divided into a linear sequence of steps, but is better modularized and flexibly networked. For such a task, the open source way of flexible, voluntary self-assignment is (more) efficient and attracts rational individuals who want to optimize the returns they receive on their time invested. The difficulty with this analysis is that the efficiency criterion runs the danger of becoming tautological since it is not clear in relation to what efficiency is supposed to be assessed. Successful projects are efficient, because efficiency leads to success. While Weber acknowledges that the FOSS mode of development can be 'expensive and messy' and lead to 'wasted resources' (p.158) he sees the efficiency of FOSS embodied in 'a powerful sense that it is not merely inefficient, but downright stupid, almost criminal, for people to have solve the same problem twice' (p.138). Yet, in fact, FOSS is so full of duplications that it is impossible to count the number of Linux distributions or text processing programs or music players. Here, clearly, something different than economic efficiency and resource maximization is driving development as well. Perhaps the beauty of FOSS is that it is not only about efficiency, but also about freedom and idiosyncrasies, which makes it hard to tell in advance what is a brilliant innovation or a tremendous waste of time. Weber's book serves both as a solid introduction to the social and political issue raised by FOSS, and as an advanced analysis of some of its aspects, particularly the novel governance mechanism and the productive concept of the voluntary hierarchy."