"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

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

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

Key Articles and Essays

• Identifying and understanding the problems of Wikipedia’s peer governance: The case of inclusionists versus deletionists. by Kostakis, Vasilis begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 3 - 1 March 2010 [2]

• 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. [3] : 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 [4]

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.