[Themaintainers] Liberalism, Coherence and peer production

Sat Aug 24 17:28:05 EDT 2019

Intriguing stuff.  You might find these three pieces useful.  They frame
the question differently (solidly within administrative/organizational
science rather than political economy), but perhaps they are getting at
similar things? The general argument is that the (shared) artifact itself
does much of what has traditionally been done by coordination mechanisms,
including top-down direction.

Bolici, F., Howison, J., & Crowston, K. (2016). Stigmergic coordination in
FLOSS development teams: Integrating explicit and implicit mechanisms.
Cognitive Systems Research, 38, 14–22.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2015.12.003

This piece below goes a little further, in some ways, discussing how the
shared software (and its itch generating use) actually conducts a search
for appropriate next steps and motivated actors, thus the artifact (and its
networked distribution) take on more functions of the firm and its
centralization of power.

Howison, J., & Crowston, K. (2014). Collaboration through open
superposition: A theory of the open source way. MIS Quarterly, 38(1),
29–50. http://james.howison.name/pubs/howison-2014-superposition.pdf

Also, Aron Lindberg's work on emergence/variation of routines in FLOSS
projects seems relevant here:

Lindberg, A., Berente, N., Gaskin, J., & Lyytinen, K. (2016). Coordinating
Interdependencies in Online Communities: A Study of an Open Source Software
Project. Information Systems Research, 27(4), 751–772.
https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2016.0673

I'd be very interested in hearing if these are useful to your thinking.

Best regards,
James

ps.  I'm looking forward to reading "The emergence of routines" as well,
Phil!

On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 2:53 PM PHILIP SCRANTON <
scranton at scarletmail.rutgers.edu> wrote:

> 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://secure-web.cisco.com/16G3Ae-57d5KWJ6JeHLxGhZ81hzL5Gz4LhTBuOtPNibsIgS0J9pZgi9kQ3PdAvEn1kf-3BtqP7cOkaneHoqXll5W0T-8RygZxYpRlcqJWO4W6C9LwgoIqVY5cJGYrpNnvMQJHWWGMQO8GyEOg79wldo4ENT0wL9P_74aZJE5d9_UTKHvumqMAvqoOVfwZ8GQajHy0mewEfPhW4Y0SW7VSFLHkZ5oEf8TT5LNiaO4izdy7CLkAJiLU1cm4EVvYJ8S-Ot3lJMtilpkm7Y7K6Juyt5itpgyZ5GalW1kn978mbnNOk0HDeS-HTfNFEeAhXLcjbBTx1NHxsO51cLu0uYHSFLUIde3uIQErjk-ZLI9vb0kRrDxcKpxavkgibOXr-k8rlpLyJbJczfUkN4EUQAO3JRKPj_eDHQ7LTYx-4KJGX_1NzgAQJMvrOBQR6KwpecG_naGWSAbQVJl_crf236kWGsItqRwVb7kveHDOv3fxCEF2wtHEY_8U8eEp8m-N6oKM004Dc8217oG8ux5y3CJQaITk7dmNGQGuVxgWV3_sLBpkIBHsH26-NIWCZ26zqj8Hx4p8hcDsC_SfZQ6_X0J4B8UEoIJ1HhfibABAtyhL6yU/http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.c2.com%2F?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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-- 
James Howison

Associate Professor and Director of Doctoral Studies
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
http://james.howison.name
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