Managing Boundaries between Organizations and Communities

* Paper: 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.

URL = http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper.pdf

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

Abstract

"In this paper we investigate the dialectical relation between informal communities and related formal organizations by looking at Wikimedia and Creative Commons. While delivering their services with the help of related communities of volunteers from the very start, both organizations struggle with dynamics of community development and governance in general and with the management of boundaries between organization and community in particular. In our comparative longitudinal case analysis we contrast attempts of coping with these challenges via partial outsourcing (Creative Commons) and via partial integration (Wikimedia) respectively. Thereby we show why the pragmatist concept of “corrigible provisionality” might be a promising approach for capturing the practices dominating boundary management between organizations and related communities."

Excerpts

Introduction

Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack:

"Borders of market and non-market modes of production coevolve, leading to cooperation and conflict between (for-profit) business and (non-profit) civil society organizations in the production of all kinds of cultural goods.

For both types of organizations alike, this leads to new challenges for the management of their respective organizational environment in general and related communities of consumers, users or even contributors in particular; this holds independent of whether these communities are effectively delivering the content of new knowledge services as is the case in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia or the photo-platform Flickr, or whether these are „merely‟ contributing with feedback to the marketability of products and services. Both online and offline, organizations increasingly face the non-trivial task of mobilizing communities of practice (Wenger 1998), whose members mostly do not belong to the organization itself. This integration of user and practice communities in the core processes of good and service provision seriously blurs the boundary between organization and environment, making its management via specialized “boundary spanning units” (xxx) difficult at best, obsolete at worst.

...

Especially organizations, which strive as “market rebels” (Rao 2009) to alter established norms, taken-.for-granted assumptions and market structures, regularly rely on (the resources of) communities of consumers, users or practice; facilitating such communities poses challenges similar to those of managing volunteers (Lofland 2006) and is of utmost importance for the social-movement-like struggles of those organizations, be they non-profit or for-profit. Following King and Pearce (2010), such community-based attempts of creating or changing market institutions work via influencing corporate strategies, participating in private regulatory endeavours and/or the creation of new actor categories within globalizing economic fields."

...

(Researchers) "share a reluctance to investigate the relationship between communities and related formal organizations (Mayntz 2008; for a notable exception see O‟Mahoney and Bechky 2008) in processes of mobilization and coordination. Group structures and dynamics of communities are typically characterised as informal and portrayed as stark contrast to classic organizational bureaucracies (see, for example, Hemetsberger and Reinhardt 2009). But while hardly any of the different phenomena subsumed under the umbrella of diverse community concepts above evolves completely detached from related formal organizational bodies, digital communities in particular rely on commercial (e.g. Canonical in the case of Ubuntu Linux) or non-profit (e.g. Wikimedia Foundation in the Wikipedia case) carrier organizations or “platforms” (Elkin-Koren 2009b).

In spite of its relevance, formal organizing is not identical to the organizational features and dynamics of its respective communities. In spite of partial overlaps, we conceptualize communities as being part of an organization‟s enivornment, the borders being continually and reciprocally re-produced and re-shaped by the actors involved (Giddens 1984). In this regard, formal organizing may (strategically) irritate, influence, foster, guide and control community development but it is not community development itself. This is similar to the relationship between a social movement and related social movement organizations (see, for example, Della Porta and Diani‟s 2006). Existing typologies of these or similar civil society organizations however rarely cover organizational fluidity and change rooted in reciprocal interactions of community and organization (e.g. Salomon und Anheier 1996; Anheier und Themudo 2005a, 2005b). Similarly, the efficacy of organizations in giving orientation, direction and voice to diffuse communities in their attempts of challenging institutions is understudied (Mayntz 2008; for an exception see O‟Mahoney and Bechky 2008). Both these shortcomings are even more salient for the case of organizations, whose transnational scope of activities require addressing heterogeneity of community members rooted in national and local diversity. Therefore, the general question we are addressing is: How do organizations in digital information economy manage the boundaries to related focal communities?

...

We compare two prominent examples of transnational non-profit franchising: In the case of Creative Commons an organizational network around a focal non-profit NGO develops and propagates a set of alternative copyright licenses. Founded in 2002, Creative Commons managed to port its licenses into 50 local jurisdictions with the help of over 70 affiliate organizations within no more than 6 years (Dobusch and Quack 2010). As Creative Commons licenses can be applied to all kinds of copyrightable material – from audio and video to educational and scientific works – Creative Commons has to deal with (demands of) a fast growing and highly diverse community of license users. The second case we are investigating is Wikimedia, which has been created as a formal organization to support the communities behind Wikipedia and its related sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikinews or Wikibooks.2 While having been established as a US-based foundation in 2003, it officially recognizes 21 local “Wikimedia chapter” organizations by the end of 2008. These Wikimedia chapters have all been newly set up and are legally and financially autonomous.

In both cases the formal organization provides a regulatory framework, within which communities of contributors create (a commons of) digital goods and services. This, together with further similarities of Creative Commons and Wikimedia in terms of founding date (2002 and 2003 respectively), place (US) and organizational form (non-profit franchise network) as well as in terms of central mission (community building and development), allows focusing three theoretically interesting differences in terms of (1) organizational structure, (2) organization-community relation and (3) transnationalization process.

...

We use this distinction between “formal organizing” and “organized informality” to differentiate between “community” and “organization”, which is a precondition for analyzing their reciprocal conditionality: Of course, communities are not “un-organized” as they rely on implicit and explicit rules, its members consciously share a sense of belonging, and they regularly evolve around some form of formal organizational body.3 But differently to formal organizations, community membership is acquired via self-identification, decisions are made without reference to any legally binding rules and there is no “shadow of hierarchy” (Heritiér and Lehmkuhl 2008). Taken together these characteristics lead to the egalitarianism inherent in many community self-descriptions.4 This egalitarian notion of the community concept may be at odds with huge actual status differences among community members but lies nevertheless orthogonally to the implicitness of hierarchical structures within formal organizations, however decentralized, heterarchical or “organic” (Burns and Stalker 1961) these may be.

...

Community participation has to be differentiated from classical forms of corporate worker participation (Sydow 1999; xxx; Demirovic 2007) and from participation in non-profit organizations (see, for example, Kriesi 1996; Della Porta and Diani 2006): Both these forms of participation regularly solely relate to members of the organization.. In our case, however, we are interested particularly in participation in intra-organizational decision-making processes by communities, which mostly consist of non-members; intentionally extending organizational borders to include most or even all of the community members is thus an extreme or fringe case of community participation. Lastly, we are not dealing with classical forms of inter-organizational relations (see Sydow 1992), since the organization is not cooperating with another formal entity." (http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper.pdf)

Typology of Community Participation

Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack:

"The two-by-two matrix in Figure 1 leads to four ideal types of organization-community-relations:

• In the case of benevolent dictatorship a single organization sets the scene for the activities of a related community without admitting community members to the organization‟s decision making. Many prominent examples of digital communities such as Facebook or Flickr (see Ritzer and Jurgensen 2010) rely on benevolent dictatorship of a corporation, which provides and determines the technological and legal framework for community development.

• In an organizational network or coalition several legally and financially autonomous organizations jointly undertake this task, but still do not provide community members with access to their decision making.

• While commercial carrier organizations also experiment with community participation (e.g. “user innovation”, see Braun and Herstatt 2009; von Hippel 2001, 2006), modes of organizing that resemble the ideal types of representative or grassroots democracy are more common in non-commercial settings. In representative democracies, the constituency of community members takes part in the election of representatives within formal organizational bodies.

• In grass-roots democracies, membership-based organizations allow formal participation and self-governance, regularly in addition to representative democratic elections. Examples are the Debian project8 in the realm of open source software development and, as will be presented in this article, Wikimedia. In these cases community members can influence the formal organization either by direct democratic votes or by becoming part of a membership-based organization, whose divisions act (more or less) autonomously on behalf of its respective members."

(http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper.pdf)

Comparing Wikipedia and Creative Commons

Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack:

"Both, Creative Commons and the now famous online-encyclopedia Wikipedia share the fundamental vision of creating and promoting a global “commons” of freely available digital goods. Wikimedia hosts a framework of hardware (webspace and bandwith), software (the wiki-engine “MediaWiki”)10 and legal rules (copyleft licenses) for several projects of commons-based peer production (Benkler 2006) such as the already mentioned examples Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wiktionary. Creative Commons, in turn, delivers a set of open content licenses to – not only, but also – legally enable and foster such commons-based peer production projects as put forward by Wikimedia and more generally to build a growing body licensed works for sharing and remixing. Consequently, before Wikimedia eventually adopted one particular Creative Commons license in 2009, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales regularly stated that “Wikipedia, had it been founded after Creative Commons, would have certainly been under a Creative Commons license.”11 The timeline in Figure 2 gives an overview of the most important events in the development of both cases, which are described in more detail in the following two sections. While Wikipedia was founded shortly before Creative Commons in 2001, its organizational carrier – the Wikimedia Foundation – was founded about half a year after Creative Commons had formally launched its first set of alternative copyright licenses in December 2002.

Interestingly, independent from one another, both organizations very soon after their foundation started to transnationalize their formal organization by developing a transnational network of locally rooted organizations – something we refer to a as a “political franchising network” Similar to “strategic networks” in the realm of business research (see Jarillo 1993; Sydow 1992). Their strategies of building such an organizational network were however quite distinct. While Creative Commons followed something we would call a “political franchise” approach, i.e. bonding and cooperating with existing organizations, Wikimedia betted on newly founded grass-root organizations for its internationalization. This difference in strategy in turn also leads to different challenges in managing the relationship between formal organization and informal community: the very fast transnationalization as a consequence of the political franchise approach also partially led to unsustainably small groups of local activists, while the “grassroots approach” slowed down transnationalization in the first place." (http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper.pdf)

Case Studies

1. Creative Commons - Governance
2. Wikipedia - Governance

More Information

Author's blog at http://governancexborders.wordpress.com