[Themaintainers] Liberalism, Coherence and peer production

PHILIP SCRANTON scranton at scarletmail.rutgers.edu
Sat Aug 24 15:53:28 EDT 2019


For some historical examples, you might look at the essays collected in The
Emergence of Routines, edited by Daniel Raff and me (Phil Scranton), Oxford
University Press, 2018. Negotiated standards were frequently documented by
the contributors to this conference volume.
   Best regards, Phil S.

On Saturday, August 24, 2019, jan <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.c2.com%2F%3FConceptualIntegrity&data=02%7C01%7Cscranton%40scarletmail.rutgers.edu%7C9d636362bece4a1f08a008d728c7aca6%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C0%7C637022710376170505&sdata=VDFvudPQpXcxI2t9I7iMNhUeCsniJXhZBR%2FbxXXb4hE%3D&reserved=0>
> 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.
>
>

-- 
Philip Scranton, Emeritus Board of Governors Professor, History of Industry
& Technology,
Rutgers University;
Author, Enterprise, Organization and Technology in China: A Socialist
Experiment, 1950-1971
Palgrave Macmillan (2019).  BOOK LINK:
https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783030003975?wt_mc=ThirdParty.SpringerLink.3.EPR653.About_eBook#aboutBook
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