Cyberchiefs

= detailed study of Peer Governance in "online tribes"

Book: Cyberchiefs. Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes. Mathieu O’Neil. Macmillan/Pluto Press, 2009.

Commentary

Michel Bauwens:

"Peer production is by now a very accepted term and concept and it has its classic study, i.e. The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. But I can’t really say that the second concept of the P2P Theory trilogy, i.e. peer governance, has taken off in any real sense, though many studies do tackle the governance of open source communities, but without naming it as peer governance. Does this mean that researchers do not recognize this as a separate area of study?

In any case, the classic study there is Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source.

Now however, comes a second book: while I have to reserve my judgment, as I have just started reading it, I think it’s fair to say that it is the very first monography to specifically tackle the study authority and leadership in peer production communities. So I find this publication significant, as a founding moment for the dedicated study of peer governance, even though the author does not use the concept.

Summary

Here’s a short summary by the publisher, followed by the motivation of the author:

Mathieu O'Neill:

“People are inventing new ways of working together on the internet. Decentralized production thrives on weblogs, wikis and free software projects. InCyberchiefs, Mathieu O’Neil focuses on the regulation of these working relationships. He examines the transformation of leadership and expertise in online networks, and the emergence of innovative forms of participatory politics. What are the costs and benefits of alternatives to hierarchical organization? Using case studies of online projects or “tribes” such as the radical Primitivism archive, the Daily Kos political blog, the Debian free software project and Wikipedia, O’Neil shows that leaders must support maximum autonomy for participants and analyses the tensions generated by this distribution of authority.”

Mathieu O’Neil on Why I wrote ‘Cyberchiefs’:

“I wanted to answer this question: how does power operate within groups who reject domination? How do leaders justify their authority in anarchistic communities on the Internet? This meant that there needed to be a new theory of power, something which sociology was uniquely equipped to do, but which had not yet happened. This theory would have to take into account the different dimensions of power online: power as an archaic force (a male universe of hackers), as a collectivist enterprise (the rejection of traditional forms of hierarchy), as the affective recognition of the extraordinary brilliance of great individual and the extraordinary position of great nodes on a network.

I did my PhD research on zines (idiosyncratic marginal magazines) in the San Francisco Bay Area in the nineties. My approach was influenced by Pierre Bourdieu: here is an underground market with its own rules of the games, systems of oppositions, and it is a way for people to show how ‘cool’ they are in relation to mainstream culture. So in a sense they are really reproducing dominant patterns of cultural distinction. But, there are oppositions as to what constitutes ‘coolness’ between punks who reject correct discourse, and others who embrace correction.

One thing that really interested me at the time is how do you make people respect the rules of reciprocity in autonomous systems without formal justice and police systems? Apart from public shaming, there wasn’t much that could be done about people who didn’t send zines even though someone else had send them a zine or a few dollars. I was also interested in the networking aspect: who is a hub, who operates as a bridge between disconnected groups, etc. When weblogs started I was struck by the similarity with zines: blogs were going to ‘retake the media; etc. So I started looking at them, doing surveys like I had done with zines. I also learnt more about webmetrics; about social network analysis and network theory mechanisms such as ‘preferential attachment’ (new entrants on networks tend to link to the incumbents: the rich always get richer). I looked at social anthropology (conflicts, boundaries, monstrous ‘others’) and political anthropology (tribes as rejection of separated power), I spent a lot of time with political philosophy (the public sphere, counter-publics) but ended up cutting that chapter out, and the biggest new influence was perhaps Luc Boltanski and the key concept of justification; also his idea that it is not just sociologists who can understand and uncover domination (what Bourdieu or Foucault say) but that ordinary people have reflexivity, can evaluate the respective claims of people during conflicts. All this inexorably led me back to the foundation of modern sociology: Max Weber’s theory of legitimate power or authority.

Justification is not so different from legitimation. I wanted to show how authority integrates the dominant value on the Internet, autonomy; how this relates to informational capitalism; how communities address sexism, hierarchy, expertise, bureaucracy, according to the structure of their relations of authority; and what this means for the future of autonomy.”

Typology

From chapter 4:

"Since the mid-to-late 1990s and the democratisation of Internet access, non-technically able users have joined in online information sharing and cooperative work. In today’s Web 2.0 environment, the range of those who exercise technical control has dramatically risen. Examples dealt with in this book include Wikipedia articles and progressive political weblogs. Figure 1 presents a spatial representation of the field of online authority in the form of four quadrants intersected by two main axes of charisma and sovereignty. Online tribes are positioned in the quadrants according to the structure of their authority relations.

[Figure 1 about here]

The top-left quadrant is empty as it corresponds to the space of governementality: that is, popular sovereignty with no autonomy. An example would be the online networks developed by political candidates to give their supporters the impression that grassroots activism is taking place.

The schematic representation of the space suggests that online authority regimes do not exist in a perfectly pure state, but rather in various forms of combinatory amalgamations. Since sovereign and charismatic authority tend to contradict one another, can we expect to find an especially high occurrence of conflicts in the top-left quadrant, where the overlap is the strongest? And what are the consequences of rejecting all forms of authority, as in the bottom-left quadrant? An important question for understanding online authority concerns the passage from autocratic systems based on charismatic authority to democratic systems based on sovereign authority, as occurred in LambdaMOO, or in the Debian free software community. What factors enhance or prevent the emergence of more democratic forms? If the quest for justice is a driver of a change in authority regimes, why does the contestation of archaic force on weblogs not lead to the development of sovereign authority?

A central tenet of pragmatic sociology’s focus on action is that research should endeavour to determine how online authority is justified in situation. To this end, the following four chapters propose case studies of online tribes, which will serve to illustrate the different positions in the space of online tribalism as represented in figure 1. The four tribes are: radical anarcho-primitivist websites and forums (lower-left quadrant); progressive political weblogs (lower-right quadrant); the Debian free software mailing lists and the English Wikipedia wiki and mailing lists (upper-right quadrant). As mentioned above, the upper-left quadrant is tribeless. The analysis will compare the four tribes in terms of three main parameters: project and space, authority structure, conflicts and enemies. These categories are briefly presented in the remainder of this chapter.

Project and space. How does the project embody autonomy? What kind of computer-mediated communication is it, what technical possibilities are available for ordinary users? In terms of participation, how does recruitment operate, what kind of contract is offered to new entrants – what are their roles, duties and privileges? How are boundaries maintained? Finally, how do tribes deal with the embedding of online autonomy in network capitalism?

Authority Structure. What is the relationship between expertise (learned authority) and leadership (administrative authority)? To what extent is charismatic or sovereign executive authority distributed? What are the tools of governance, such as norms and rules, monitoring, adjudication, and enforcement mechanisms? Is authority strong, weak or inconsistent?

Conflicts and enemies. Since antagonism is central to tribal activity, a particular focus of analysis will be conflicts. Rules regulate the integration of patches or the positions of people. Conflicts, triggered by the application, justification or absence of rules, are the means by which people affirm their adherence to, or rejection of, the rules and the authority order which they underpin. A central concern will be the role of enemies. The definition of outside enemies is vital to coalesce project cohesion and exclusionary boundaries. This is all the more the case when projects experience internal conflict: outside enemies will help to reinforce project solidarity."