<div>Hi,</div>
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<div>Thanks for the references Robert.</div>
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<div>I thought that this reply to a correspondent might be of interest to some; it expands on the issue of leadership and power in peer production projects,</div>
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<div>Michel</div>
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<div>1_What is the connotation of the word "dictatorship" in your phrase:<br> "...Peer projects are sometimes said to be benevolent dictatorships..."? (derive from "The political economy of peer production" ,found at:
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499" target="_blank">http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499</a>) </div>
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<div>Reply:</div>
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<div>If you define peer production as this kind of social production that is based on free engagement, participatory processes of governance, and distributed output in a commons format, then obviously the leadership function changes rather profoundly. One form of power is in the protocol or the design of the collaborative processes, the 'invisible architectures' that promote or inhibit certain types of social behaviour. For example, YouTube only allows sharing of the whole video, not remixing. Another type of power is reputation, which depends on the individuals own merit, his role in the group, and the role of the project in society. Peer governance is neither hierarchical/centralized, nor decentralized/democratic, but rather based on direct participation and co-decision-making in small groups, as peer production functions as a global coordination of small teams. Each team small enough to work on the basis of consensus. It's not democratic in the formal 'representational' sense, because their is no negotation between representatives of groups, who have to decide about scarce resources, rather the free distributed production is matched by distributed communal validation. Above all, starting from a context of either abundance or distribution, peer production and governance is a means to avoid bottlenecks of any kinds. It is designed to allow permanent experimentation, and to validate after they have been produced.
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<div>I used to write how the p2p dynamic de-institutionalizes, but I now would say it differently. Every social mode of production, especially new ones, need to reproduce themselves, and for this they will need, yes, institutional structures. For example, in terms of peer production they would use 1) collective choice systems that are either based on objective algorhythms (think google doublepage ranking) or communally validated rating/ranking systems, that aim to prohibit the formation of fixed elites; 2) they will form, over time, processes to resolve conflicts (think the expanding set of rules within wikipedia), and 3) legal innovations such as the GPL and CC licenses, which protect the commons from private appropriation; 4) various anti-hijacking measures; and 5) finally, an institutional framework to protect the technological infrastructure (usually nonprofit foundations such as the mozilla, apache, and other foundations); 5) they may accept a support ecology from either business or state as long as it does not involve control over the community dynamic.
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<div>Some structures may of course be totally ad hoc structures, but these then, because they do not insure their social reproduction, will really be ad hoc, i.e. short term, just individuals working together or sharing for a short term.
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<div>Now, to come back to the leadership issue. Since there is no hierarchy to allocate resources, no democratic negotiation, what is the role of 'leaders'. It is twofold, one is a priori and invitational. They must have the ability to describe a vision that will attract the peer producers in the first place. Think Stallman saying we need free software, Torvalds saying we need an alternative operating system, Wales and Sanger saying we need a universal encyclopedia. But their role is also one of arbitrage,
i.e. the a posteriori role of an arbiter in case of unsolvabe conflicts. If the teams do not agree on a course of action, after a number of intermediate steps, the issue will end up with the 'benevolent dictator'.
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<div>This is a pragmatic solution, but also a misnomer since in peer production, it is the leader who is dependent on the peer producers, and his arbitrage is only there because of the trust of the community. So it is in fact something altogether different than a 'dictatorship'. There is always a danger to informal processes, nl. of hidden personal domination, which is why the more complex projects in the end choose for more formal, and sometimes 'democratic' (in terms of voting and representation) set of procedures.
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<div>Juch as distributed networks may adapt partial decentralization and centralization, and peer production may make different kinds of adaptations with the market and the for-profit world, so peer governance may also be mixed with other modes. The key is then to be sensitive whether this adaption preserves the core of the processes,
i.e. it is adapted for more efficiency or precisely for achieving more participation, or whether it is indicative of a fixed group 'taking power'.</div></div>