[Themaintainers] Liberalism, Coherence and peer production

Wed Aug 28 12:15:11 EDT 2019

Hello Jan - 

Thank you (and everyone who responded) for a fascinating thread!  I thought I would write, belatedly, to tell you about my book from 2014, called Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks <https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/open-standards-and-the-digital-age/3605A03EC74D80F2D30FE233C7BCBF35> (Cambridge UP).  In particular, it takes up your suggestion...

> 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.

... through its core argument that networks and standards are themselves critiques.  Here’s a paragraph from the introduction:

"Throughout this book, I extend this line of inquiry to study acts of critique (and, in many cases, creative destruction) that were advanced by telephone and
computer engineers. In some cases, these engineers offered explicit critiques – clear remarks on existing political, market, and technical issues – in private
meetings, conference presentations, and written publications. In other cases, their critiques and challenge to the status quo were implicit in their creation of
new artifacts, new software, and new institutions – collective acts of recomposition and invention that were not always accompanied by explicit claims of superiority. When we interpret engineering practice as acts of implicit and explicit critique, we will be in a better position to understand how new standards and new networks emerge as components of broader visions that respond to the past and present and that seek to redistribute power and control in the future. The “open systems” created in the late twentieth century, and the “open standards” described by the title of this book, thus constitute critiques and rejections of ideologies of centralized control."

Much of the analysis is inspired by scholars on the history of standards and business/technology that you probably already know: Yates/Murphy, Abbate, Bowker/Star, Louis Galambos, Steve Usselman, and Richard John.

By connecting the processes for setting Internet standards with earlier episodes in “consensus” standard-setting, such as in mechanical engineering, telegraphy, telephone/utility poles, and so on, one of my objectives was to show continuities between industrial practice and the more contemporary sites discussed earlier in this thread, such as in open source software and ‘peer production.’  My book argues for more continuity, less rupture - standard fare for historians :) - and describes how experiences become embodied not only into artifacts, as you mention, but also into organizational rules and routines, such as the consensus standards-setting process itself.  You probably know that Yates and Murphy’s recent book Engineering Rules <https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/engineering-rules> is really a must-read on these topics, notably for its global view (something my book lacked).

I’m less sure about what to say about terms that featured in your initial email, “libertarian” and “free individuals.”  To the extent that the libertarian project seeks to erase or de-emphasize the role of the state in the production of standards, I think it’s empirically false. Lee Vinsel is crystal clear on this issue in Moving Violations <https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/moving-violations>, for example. And scholars who take deep and (one might even say) sympathetic views of industry self-regulation, for example Timothy Lytton’s excellent Outbreak <https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo35855002.html> on food safety, see very important roles for governments in setting standards. Now, perhaps you’re referring to individuals who are taking part in standards-setting who *perceive* that they can be effective in the absence of government action? I would agree that such individuals make fascinating material for analysis, even if I would find their self-perception to be, well, let’s just say I’m not convinced.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful, and good luck with your project - I know you’ve got a community of people here who are really eager to hear what you turn up!

Andy

> On Aug 25, 2019, at 10:16 AM, jan <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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!
> 
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