Nottingham Peer Production Workshop

Below are various materials related to the first academic conference on Peer Production, held at Nottingham Trent University on November 15-16, 2007, co-organized by Andreas Wittel and Michel Bauwens.

Presentations

1. Stefan Merten (Oekonux): Free Software: The Most Mature P2P Economy. 1) Text version of key Oekonux concepts.
2. Adam Arvidsson: Review: The Ethical Economy
3. Yuwei Lin: Women's collective action in the free software world
4. Paul Hartzog and Richard Adler, Oort-Cloud: Social Publishing in a Peer to Peer World.
5. Henrik Ingo, Do we want Direct Democracy?
6. Dr Athina Karatzogianni, University of Hull, author of Cyberconflict: Is P2P for Real: the need for research.

Details

Yuwei Lin:

I was there, too. I gave a talk titled 'Women's collective action in the free software world' at this workshop. I argued that voluntary work in free software is not necessarily unpaid labour; people are motivated by a variety of matters to get involved in free software. However, the majority of the rewarded and visible labour is coding jobs largely done by men. In this talk, I drew on the stories about women's practices in developing and using free software, and tackled such overemphasis on the value of coding and men's work. I called for attention to invisible values of mutual helping, mutual learning, participating, and sharing experiences. I also called for acknowledgement of women's participation (and hence diverse ways of coding and hacking) in the free software world.