[Themaintainers] Liberalism, Coherence and peer production

[jan]

Hello James,
Hello List,

 > You might find these three pieces useful.…
 > The general argument is that the (shared) artifact
 > itself does much of what has traditionally been done by coordination
 > mechanisms, including top-down direction.

Thanks!
Yes, they were very interesting. The idea of the shared artifacts as 
means for coordination comes up similarly (and problematicized) in "The 
Limits of self-organization"[1] arguing that the code (seen as original 
'open source'-medium) has helpful qualities that other content does not 
have (e.g. technological "checks" like: compiles or not), and that the 
modularization suggested by the shared technology (e.g. a Wiki suggests 
single pages for articles) will might ease internal coherence of the 
parts but not necessarily among each other (One article might use very 
different conventions than the other)

A work that came into my mind this morning which discusses larger 
changes that need new standards and frames is Bowkers "Lest we Remember" [2]

So with this and the research on the coordination by the technological 
artifact, it might be interesting how forgetting and reinterpretation 
works if much coherence is implicity achieved by the shared artifact, 
which in turn would need to be reinterpreted.

It would probably be also worth looking specifically into histories of 
standards and organizational forgetting to see how changes against the 
"status quo" were legitimized and actors mobilized.


Jan


[1] https://firstmonday.org/article/view/1405/1323
[2] Bowker, Geoffrey C. 1997. “Lest We Remember: Organizational 
Forgetting and the Production of Knowledge.” Accounting, Management and 
Information Technologies 7 (3): 113–38. 
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0959-8022(97)90001-1.


On 24.08.19 23:28, James Howison wrote:
> 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!
>