[Themaintainers] Liberalism, Coherence and peer production

[jan]

Hello Maintainers,

I participate in a few open source projects [0] and decisions are often 
taken either by an "emergent" consensus or by a "do-cracy" in which 
people build something which might stick around. I noted that it seems 
to be hard to get "conceptual integrity" [1], meaning that a single or 
few principles can be used to explain why the software is the way it is. 
A rough hypothesis would be that defining, keeping and negotiating 
conceptual integrity needs a power concentration which is hard to 
achieve in a system where "free individuals" take their decisions where 
no or few representational and legitimized actors exist that could 
enforce rules/principles that others must/will follow.

  I expected discussions of this to be easy to find, however the closest 
I found so far were:

- The discussions of Standards in Relation to Hayek’s views on economy 
and freedom in /"Standards: Recipes for Reality" //[2]///(which has few 
direct relation to peer production settings)

- "/Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness." /which discusses the 
relationship of /Peer Production, Openness//and Neoliberalism /(but not 
standard setting or coherence)/
/


I wonder if you know of literature discussing the (non) negotiation of 
standards and conceptual integrity in context that value a libertarian, 
free-individuals-focussed peer production culture.

Kind Regards,

  Jan


[0] Mediawiki, Libre Office, Open Source Design

[1] See Brook’s Mythical Man Month or this: 
http://wiki.c2.com/?ConceptualIntegrity
It could be also described as "local standards" which a project follows.

[2] Busch, Lawrence. 2013. /Standards: Recipes for Reality/. MIT Press 
Ltd, p291: "For [Hayek], habits that are formed unconsciously were 
considerably more desirable than those formed consciously. What he 
failed to see was that this merely enshrines the existing order as 
somehow always more desirable than any alternative imagined future.", 
which has an interesting resemblance to Jo Freeman’s "Tyranny of 
Structurelessness"

[3] Tkacz, Nathaniel. 2014. /Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness/. 
Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press.

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