[Themaintainers] Liberalism, Coherence and peer production

[Julien Kirch]

Hello,

They are not formal studies but I think the books « The Architecture of Open Source » ( http://aosabook.org/en/index.html <http://aosabook.org/en/index.html> ) contains some elements about this topic. They mostly discuss the technical choices but I remember in some cases they also mention the evolutions and how things have been decided.

Julien


> Le 24 août 2019 à 21:17, jan <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> 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 <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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