* PhD Thesis: Self-organisation in Commons-Based Peer Production (Drupal: “the drop is always moving”). By David Rozas. University of Surrey, Department of Sociology, Centre for Research in Social Simulation, 2017

URL = https://davidrozas.cc/sites/default/files/publications/files/phd_thesis_drupal_cbpp_pre_viva.pdf

Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. This work was partially supported by the Framework programme FP7 ICT-2013-10 of the European Commission through project P2Pvalue (grant no.: 610961).

Abstract

David Rozas:

"Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other without a traditional hierarchical organisation to produce common and public goods, such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux. There is a need to understand how these communities govern and organise themselves as they grow in size and complexity.

Following an ethnographic approach, this thesis explores the emergence of and changes in the organisational structures and processes of Drupal: a large and global CBBP community which, over the past fifteen years, has coordinated the work of hundreds of thousands of participants to develop a technology which currently powers more than 2% of websites worldwide.

Firstly, this thesis questions and studies the notion of contribution in CBPP communities, arguing that contribution should be understood as a set of meanings which are under constant negotiation between the participants according to their own internal logics of value. Following a constructivist approach, it shows the relevance played by less visible contribution activities such as the organisation of events.

Secondly, this thesis explores the emergence and inner workings of the sociotechnical systems which surround contributions related to the development of projects and the organisation of events. Two intertwined organisational dynamics were identified: formalisation in the organisational processes and decentralisation in decision-making.

Finally, this thesis brings together the empirical data from this exploration of socio-technical systems with previous literature on self-organisation and organisation studies, to offer an account of how the organisational changes resulted in the emergence of a polycentric model of governance, in which different forms of organisation varying in their degree of organicity co-exist and influence each other."

1.1 Free/Libre Open Source Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.2 Research on Free/Libre Open Source Software . . . . . . . . . . 40
1.3 Commons-Based Peer Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
1.4 Research on Commons-Based Peer Production . . . . . . . . . . 56
1.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

2 Drupal: case study and research questions

2.1 What is Drupal? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
2.2 Key moments in the history of Drupal and its community . . . . 67
2.3 The growth of the community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
2.4 Life in a “do-ocracy”: a model of governance? . . . . . . . . . . 95
2.5 Research questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

==3 The exploration of self-organisation via contribution activities: conceptualising Drupal through an Activity Theory lens==

3.1 A historical overview of Activity Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
3.2 Why draw on Activity Theory for the study of peer production? 112
3.3 Conceptualising Drupal through an Activity Theory lens . . . . 115
3.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

4 Methods 125

4.1 Methodological approach: an ethnographic perspective . . . . . 125
4.2 Data collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
4.3 Ethical considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
4.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

5 Identifying contribution activities in a “code-centric” community

5.1 Contribution beyond source code in FLOSS . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
5.2 “Object-oriented” and “community-oriented” contribution activities
5.3 Representation of contribution activities in user profiles . . . . . 168
5.4 “Come for the software, stay for the community”: the role of

affective labour in the Drupal community . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

5.5 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
5.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

6 Socio-technical systems of non-core Drupal projects

6.1 The emergence of the socio-technical system of contributed projects
6.2 The Project Application Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
6.3 Case study: following a contributed project . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
6.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

7 The socio-technical system of core projects

7.1 The emergence of the socio-technical system of core projects: “in

the beginning was Dries” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

7.2 Core initiatives, leaders and gates: formalisation and decentralisation

in core . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

7.3 Case study: the story of an unofficial core initiative . . . . . . . . 216
7.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

8 Socio-technical systems of local events and DrupalCamps

8.1 Socio-technical system of local Drupal events . . . . . . . . . . . 238
8.2 Socio-technical system of DrupalCamps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
8.3 Case study: emergence of local institutions and selection of presentations

in DrupalCamps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

8.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

9 The socio-technical system of DrupalCons

9.1 Emergence of DrupalCons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
9.2 Growth of DrupalCons: “DrupalCons used to be like DrupalCamps” 265
9.3 Case study: formalisation and decentralisation in the organisation

of “modern DrupalCons” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

9.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

10 Loosen control without losing control

10.1 Drupal as a CBPP community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
10.2 Degrees of organicity in peer production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
10.3 The emergence of polycentric governance in peer production . . 313
10.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316

==11 Conclusion--

11.1 Key insights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
11.2 Impact and implications of this thesis for practitioners . . . . . . 324
11.3 Future work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

Self-Organisation in Commons-Based Peer Production

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