Ahhh. The joys of community production. This weeks readings encapsulate the shift away from the centralized model of production that has been de rigueur since the Industrial Revolution, and towards the decentralized approaches we are currently seeing utilized through networked technologies.
Benkler, Webber and Nissenbaum provide a solid foundation for exploring this movement- it’s history, it’s effect, and just how different this approach to production is.
The Success of Open Source
Steve Weber, in the beginnings of The Success of Open Source, frames his book some large questions regarding open source software that are a good launching point for the rest of this weeks readings as well.
-Weber is a trained MD and PhD in political science, so the framing of the questions presented in this section/book come from the standpoint of political economy
-Weber describes how open source software has a novel definition of property, moving from property as the right to exclude others from its use, and toward the right to distribute.
-He believes that this definition will often sound awkward as we have been so conditioned on the former model of property, and that most people are not familiar with the open source community.
Two Questions-
1.) How do talented computer programmers from geographically and culturally diverse backgrounds manage to come together in networked environments without a top-down structure to produce software that rivals or bests software by huge corporations?
2.) Why does this matter to anyone who isn’t a computer programmer?
-Weber restates these large questions to demonstrate that the open source movement has created a huge shift away from firm/government controlled models of production, and has allowed individuals to work together and produce outside of these well established forms.
-The open source movement also provides new insight and perspective on social organization and cooperation. Through the open source movement we can better understand how to motivate and organize individuals to work together.
-Weber views open source in part as a political struggle
-“The management of conflict is politics, and indeed there is conflict here”.
Traditional Software Development
-Weber uses the example of Coca Cola’s secret recipe and how proprietary software is often made and shipped.
-While Coke lists their ingredients, it is the particular combination of ingredients and “secret” flavorings that make it impossible to reverse engineer
-Likewise, proprietary software developers will often ship just the binary code of the operating system, rather than the source code of a piece of software to prevent reverse engineering.
-Coupled with patent, copyright, and DRM, proprietary software aims to keep end users from modifying or altering the software in a way that the company does not want.
-As well, the move to networked architecture- where
“The Political Economy of Open Source”
-Weber uses the political economy approach to explore open source in that is it “a useful focusing device for a discussion of very complex set off human and social behaviors”.
-Collective action has always been a difficult concept in political economy theory- people do not naturally want to work together, have different goals and value, have different strengths and weaknesses etc.
-By this logic, open source is an unlikely development.
-However, we have Linux- “the impossible public good”- a massive, completely workable, ever expanding operating system created by the work of thousands of people contributing- but how??
-Eric Raymond- Cathedrals v. Bazaars- Compares proprietary and open source to these formations- Cathedrals have architects and plans and huge hierarchical works crews, while bazaars spring up-the bazaar has “has produced software packages that develop ‘from strength to strength at a peed barely imaginable to cathedral builders.’”
Peter Drucker- Software created by open source is an excellent advancement, but the real gain is the shift in organization and creation over the products themselves- the shift towards decentralized, networked cooperation is going to drive future software production.
Yochai Benkler- The Wealth of Networks Presentation
-Industrial society has spawned a production/consumption society
-Production of goods was controlled by a small minority, while people consumed the goods produced.
-The introduction of networked computers has worked to undo this imbalance in part.
-The means and methods of production are now decentralized to a great degree, allowing ordinary individuals access to them.
-This decentralization has led to the rise of commons based production
-Decentralization has given individuals the “practical capacity to act”.
-Peer production is a system of large scale production that is not cleared through the control of a corporate or government entity, or by the checks instituted by the capital pricing system.
-Peer production is novel, and has also complicated production of software/computing technology- there is corporate involvement in some efforts, some individuals are paid for their efforts, while there is a great deal of completely free peer produced goods.
Peer Production-Examples:- “As crappy as Britannica”
- NASA Crater Mapping- NASA had a number of trained PhD’s working to identify and map moon craters. NASA then shifted the project towards online, where many more people could participate in a smaller scale, but in greater numbers to produce results statistically similar to the work of the PhD’s (watch out guys). NASA accomplished the same output by restructuring the task to harness many more people, and through redundancy achieve accuracy.
- SETI @Home/Einstein@Home- For profit computing companies for years have competed to build the fastest supercomputers. These two projects harnesses the power of thousands of users computers while they are not using them/idling to amass computing power beyond what is capable of what was then the fastest supercomputers around.
- Wiki Project- A thousand stubs have eventually turned into a free online encyclopedia that contains information at least “as crappy as Britannica”.
Three Keys to Peer Production
-Diverse social motivation
-Load balancing over large populations of individuals
-Self selecting of work/capabilities/interests etc.
-Benkler also describes that is is necessary to structure the tasks to encourage greater partcipation
-The tasks should be modular
-Tasks should be fine grained
-The tasks should have diversity of granularity
-The tasks and users should be integrated
Peer production communities and the tasks arising from these projects have taken on particular values: “self selection, communication, humanization, trust, norm creation, transparency, monitoring and ‘fairness’”.
Money can be used as an incentive for production in some cases, but it complicates the overall task. On the topic of money, check out the Carr-Benkler Wager. Benkler has wagered that by 2010, the most important and influential sites on the internet in 2010 will be ones that are supported by individual and community contributions. Nicholas Carr, on the other hand, believes that the most popular content will be more tradition, paid production sites.
Which side do you all take on this wager? Personally, I’m with Benkler- I guess well get into this on Tuesday.
Peer Production as a Threat To/Threatened By Incumbent Powers
-Benkler lists a number of industries that are pushing back against peer production models in that they are challenged by these new means of production and threaten their for profit hold on certain areas- telecoms, news papers, p2p file sharing etc. At the same time, the push back by incumbents’ work against peer production in a number of ways- be it by corporate or legal intervention.
Peer Production and Politics
-Commons based peer prouduction alters traditional political/news gathering, and making discovery
-The Diebold emails- a chain of individuals working across the world came together to help crack Diebold files that held evidence of faulty voting machines, helped spread this information, and defend each other against the legal pushback by Diebold. This has altered traditional news gathering ways (i.e. NYT reporter sitting in a Supreme Court hearing), and has allowed for more information to come to light that otherwise would have been ignored.
-Mixture of individuals with diverse experiences and motivations
Internet As Democratizing Force
-Benkler debunks a number of myths that surround the Internet/PP and its political opportunities
-“The Internet will become fragmented”- Not true. The internet allows individuals to bring a wide arrange of knowledge together and collect them into a more coherent whole- See Diebold story.
“The Internet will polarize people”- Some worry that the public sphere will be under attack when we stop discussing matters with those that disagree with us- Not true. 1 out 6 links from political blogs go to opposing view points, which Benkler believes is significant if people are regularly checking opposing views.
“The Internet will cluster people together”- What we do see on the internet in small enough clusters is community editing, taking the most popular and discussed stories and pushing them up into higher clusters to reach more people- small clusters discuss, then broadcast information out to others.
-The internet also allows for unprecedented opportunities for cultural convergence
-Benkler uses the videos as examples of multiple levels of political, social and cultural interaction going on that never before would have been possible
-Kanye West + Ray Charles + Katrina + The Legendary KO
-Queen and David Bowe + Vanilla Ice + Anime
Bottom line:
Peer production is radically different form of production that encourages the input of many, and the exclusion of none. While they are far from utopian and perfect, they challenge and sometimes best the current means of production.
As peer production gains steam, it becomes increasingly a threat to incumbents that will get played out through institutional authority to make peer production harder/permission based.
Benkler and Nissenbaum-
(in the light of repetition, I omitted the examples of peer production systems)
Reputation Systems
-Following a discussion of examples and successes of peer production, Benkler and Nissenbaum describe the role of different types of moderation and reputation strategies in these communities.
-Wiki talk pages are active discussions on the relevancy, direction and needs on Wiki pages, allowing for contributors to actively engage each other in the communal production of the encyclopedia
-Slashdot has a multitiered, highly moderated system of commenting that allows for communal production of relevant news stories and comments. Comments are voted up or down by members (who are given a limited degree of moderating power), and then the moderators themselves are moderated for fairness- “Who watches the Watchmen?”
Principles of Peer Production
Core Principles:
-Decentralization over centralized, corporate production
-Social cues and motivations over prices and commands
Peer Production and Virtue
Benkler and Nissenbaum approach peer production and its virtues in a somewhat agnostic viewpoint:
“At a minimum, however, we take virtue ethics to be an important approach
to moral evaluation, which offers a framework for appraising people over time,
in contrast with other dominant approaches that appraise actions, atomistically,
in terms of consequences or compatibility with deontological rules. In other
words, where the basic unit of moral evaluation for rival frameworks is
individual actions (or action-types), the basic unit of moral evaluation for virtue
ethics is the person (or soul or character), an entity persisting over time.” (pg. 404)
Benkler and Nissenbaum then approach the question of virtue through different clusters:
- Autonomy, Independence, Liberation
-One of the most notable and essential virtues found within peer production systems are these three virtues.
-Peer production encourages these virtues by freeing contributors from being attached to a particular entity directing their actions and efforts, instead allowing people to select freely the tasks they do within a given project (autonomy), allowing them to work for whatever project that they fancy (independence), and to do so outside of a corporate or government structure, as well as the market system (liberation)
- Creativity, Productivity, Industry
-Peer production encorporates these values and virtues in a number of ways. Individual contributors are allowed to work in a non-directed manner, allowing people to explore novel and creative ways to contribute to a particular project. Productivity is involved in that individuals are actively contributing to a cause, whether it be full time, or in a completely recreational capacity. It still allows for an outlet of production, and a diversion that is not just filled with consuming the work of others. This work combines to help reinforce community production, and to continue the process of community creation as an alternative to hierarchical, commercial production.
- Benevolence, Charity, Generosity, Altruism
-Community peer production allows individuals to share their knowledge and experiences with others, pass them on, and contribute to the continued production of knowledge. The nature of many of these communities is give freely and take freely. Where the time spent in these communities can be used else wise for self serving purposes, contributions to these communities allow other individuals to benefit without expectation of payment or compensation.
- Sociability, Camaraderie, Friendship, Cooperation, Civic Virtue
-Peer production communities allow for like minded individuals to come together and find other similarly situated individuals, and provide a social space for interaction amongst users. Aside from working towards a particular goal, individuals can find friendship, and build strong communities. The notion of civic virtue is also important in that it promotes the idea that individuals can contribute meaningfully not just for the community, but for the good of all- as in the case of Wiki and other community based services used by many.
From Structure to Virtue
-While these virtues undergird a number of peer production communities, Benkler and Nissenbaum explore if these virtues are motivating participation in these communities.
-Using the example of SETI, a majority of participants (58%), when asked why they participated, responded that they believed they were trying to find extra terrestrial life “for the good of humanity”. Many of the “other” responses also espoused a desire to help the scientific community and explore possibilities for the good of all man kind. Not bad, huh?
-Further, open source software developers made note that their participation in these communities was driven by a desire to help others out, and to share their experience with other members of the community.
-While Benkler and Nissenbaum concede this is not scientific, it shows that there is a strong sense of virtue in these communities. Contributors, leading by example, can help inspire and reinforce these values in other participants and keep the cycle going. Benkler and Nissenbaum conclude by stating that peer production communities are “not only as the source of knowledge and information but as a platform for virtuous practices and the development of virtue in its participants.”
Possibly Relevant Posts:
- Thursday: Free as in What? (0) | Mushon
- Wed 6:30 – Can “Design By Committee” Work? a talk by Mushon (6) | Mushon
- Come Together- Alternate Reality Games As Communities of Practice (1) | Franklin
18 Comments
I enjoyed the Weber piece a lot, he had some interesting points. I remember trying to explain the “open source” idea to my sixteen year old cousin not too long ago; as Weber projects, it was a difficult concept for him to grasp. We are largely socialized to take property as physical commodities or goods we’re able to exclude from everybody else. I suspect that this socialization has a lot to do with why open source hasn’t caught on within a larger frame or in other aspects of life. It’s fitting that open source’s largest presence is with intellectual property rather than physical property.
Benkler’s notion of how the internet has brought about the resurgence of, as Lessig put it, a “read-write” society is nothing new, but I enjoyed his presentation. It is in line with his idea (from another reading) that when copyright becomes more stringent, information is both produced and consumed less. Unfortunately, I think 2010 may have been too soon to predict the dominance of community paid/supported sites rather than production based sites, however. We shall see.
I think this is a great time to revisit the week one (or two..) discussion on negative and positive liberty. Open source production seems to represent negative liberty in that it is an example of self determined groups functioning without centralized oversight. While open source communities like wikipedia and debian linux do have strong guiding cultural values, the modes of enforcement are such that active participants in the discussion determine the direction of the community. What do people think? Does this make sense or am I just conflating ideas…
I had this gripe when I read Benkler for Core class last week, and it still bugs me: how is it good that we’re getting people on the internet to do jobs for free? People need jobs for money! Last time I checked, food costs money. I don’t want a million internet people doing the tiny tasks that make up my job. I need to do those to eat! Sure, peer production is great in the land where unicorns bring us bags of candy and golden rainbows, but in this universe we should probably let people make money doing things. And Benkler is a LABOR LAWYER. Surely he’s learned at some point that jobs are good things. Why is he so excited?
Um, rant over. I am all for the democratization of the internet, like slashdot and, to a lesser extent, Wikipedia. There will always be experts. Giving everyone a say won’t change that. Just give the NASA grad students their jobs back!
Benkler states that this model is NOT replacing capitalism. Rather, it is a way of restructuring work-flow so that more people can participate in large scale tasks. There are so many problems to be solved in the world that, if we can restructure the traditional work-flow reserved only for PhD’s to include the amateur, we can get more done and potentially solve more problems…sounds good to me.
Crowdsourced Labor: Digital Democracy or Centralized Sweatshop?
Wednesday, November 11, 7:30pm
The Change You Want To See Gallery
http://thechangeyouwanttosee.org
84 Havemeyer St, Brooklyn NY 11211
Gabe-your unicorns sound extra special. I’m just teasing. In truth, I find open source inspiring, and I wonder if I will ever personally use it to build/collaborate on my/our own new media company. I am a dreamer in corporate clothing.
That being said, I’m with Sara on this one. We need to eat. Sure, those NASA grad students could go work on something else, but even in a shared networked/capitalism model, we have record breaking unemployment in this country and the worst division between have and have not in our history.
Is there a way for the networked model to address the systemic failure we are now experiencing? Pure capitalism is not getting it done for the majority of Americans. I’d love to discuss this in class! Thanks for the excellent summary, Franklin!
I really enjoyed Benkler’s presentation (well, sort of, he’s not the best speaker). Can we please just live in a giant global commune already? Ok, not really, and I know that’s not the point of any of these materials, but Open Source and decentralization are the best ways to utilize what the internet was intended for (at least, IMO): connecting to and sharing materials with other people.
And I completely side with Benkler on the wager. Big companies have already bought up all the small online communities because they know they’re a threat.
I think this material has a lot to do with your third travelogue idea, in terms of free labor and the internet. Should people always be compensated for the work they do online? If they’re willing to do it for free, obviously they value the end result as something beneficial to society, so why not?
@ sara and gordita: again, the open source model is NOT taking jobs away from people nor should we look down on it in the face of record levels of unemployment. If anything it is a model that opens up a new space for creating opportunities. Look at the the first example that Benkler opens up with regarding the political economy of starting a newspaper. The fact that it was once $10,000 to start a newspaper and is now in the tens of millions is an indicator of a barrier that closes lots of people out from engaging in entrepreneurial activity. If the open source model can act as an environment for amateurs or professionals to play in a sandbox that can lead to the development of new products and businesses, then what we have on our hands here is a method of generating new business opportunities.
Look at the Debian Linux community for example. People here work together on their own time to create a robust operating system that allows them to take their expertise in turn to offer services (paid) to clients on implementing the product.
I love these readings! I’m curious, however, about if decentralized modes of production break down in the presence of geographic proximity. I mean, once everyone gets together in person, do you think a hierarchy would form, resulting in more centralized or tiered labor structures? Is there something about the incorporeal internet that makes this kind of production possible?
actually many open source communities are faced with the emergence of hierarchies and are actively on the outlook to make sure they dont emerge. so no, im not sure that the incorporeal element of the internet alone that prevents this. if you want to read more about this check out an article by MCC professor Biella Coleman on the how the Debian community creates and maintains its values (one of which is maintaining a horizontal governance model)
http://mako.cc/writing/coleman_hill-social_production.pdf
Something I was thinking after reading and listening, and then thought about again in relation to the 2010 prediction of the dominance of multiply-generated sites. It feels like the authors are all concerned and impressed by the social values of open source and how it could potentially transform notions of property, productivity, ownership and authorship. What I worry or wonder is how many people who benefit from these open-source wonders are clearly aware of the process of production and what is important about that. To what extent do these sites effectively make clear their vision and process of production in ways that will make people realize and appreciate them?
First off, great summary, very thorough and breaks down the arguments very well. I am primarily interested in terms of seeing the impact it will have other than software, especially politically. It is interesting to think about that perhaps if people start realizing that they can cooperate and create valuable products together as a starting point, then how far can it go? Once corporations (the market) and the government get cut out as the middle man, there possibly the potential at a sort of Utopia, where everyone works together. Benkler talks about joint models (combinations of capitalism and open source, where open source usually helps to sell a product by offering some kind of free product). I have to say, there is something very Marxist about this…Karl would have been proud haha.
@gabe: again, the open source model DOES take jobs away, in some cases. If you cannot acknowledge this fact, then you will not be able to engage in a dialogue, even with people like me who see real beauty and potential in open source, and only wish to entertain certain problems that exist within the new model. I made my openness to open source very clear, yet you choose to characterize me as looking down on it. If you can’t even see these problems, then what do we have to talk about? You seem to me to be a rather brilliant fellow, someone I could learn from, but your tone frankly annoys me. I say this to you in the spirit of making you a more persuasive scholar, and mean you no ill will.
Best,
Camille (gorditamedia)
@H-Man, check out http://www.opencongress.org/ and http://maplight.org/ While this is not a strong example of Open Source production, it is Open Source in that it creates a level of transparency in government operations that was once not there. With this people are more informed and can make better decisions.
@viola. check out the article I recommended to Mellisa.
@gordita: by jobs lost do you mean loss in the realm of traditional institutional structures? what about the opportunities gained outside of these structures? dont know if you can quantify the loss/gains here but it might be an interesting element to look into.
I enjoyed Bengler’s presentation, although it was a little dry. The important part was his ideas that it is those things that tap the mass of minds on the internet to construct. I really like that he does acknowledge that people need to be both limited by what they are allowed to contribute while still being motivated because there has to be some sort of control in the system to allow everyone to get some input, while at the same time they need to fulfill some sort of personal desire to accomplish the task; he does say that money “can but not always” mess up this system. I fully agree that money tends to really break down these systems. I did get a little lost in his discussions of polarization and how that related, in the “first generation,” to the way in which people connect over the net.
Weber’s piece was pretty straight forward, but still a little lacking with it only being an excerpt an all. It actually reminded me a lot about Shirky’s ideas on how social networks should be constructed and maintained because there are the political structures that will inevitably come out of this form of social organization, but at the same time the social organization of the individuals within the structure/system will also be the ones that shape what will happen; this seemed very similar, maybe I’m way off base. What I found most intriguing was his questioning of how open source collaboration might work within other means of production. The way I kind of interpreted this and was curious to think about was just to think of, “What would open sourcing look like through physical production?” How well could we physically collaborate on how we will design, say, shoes for the future? Is this even possible, or is it the immateriality of program open sourcing that allows collaboration to function easier?
I absolutely loved this quote by Weber in this weeks reading:
“My point is that during the early stages of economic and social change, analysts often pay more attention to what is going away than what is struggling to be born. To use Schumpeter’s phrasing, it is easier to see precisely the destructive side of creative destruction than it is to see the creative side.”
And I completely can see that with the traditional media’s attempt to grasp onto copyright laws that we were talking about last week. I also think it speaks to the open source debate above and the political economy Benkler talks about. While I read Benkler for Core like many of you did recently, I got a completely different view from his talk. I was the one who said in Camille’s class last night that Benkler worried me because someone had to manufacture food (“I like to eat”). But in the talk he did in fact say that capitalism itself isn’t going anywhere, but the addition of new market forces means everyone should take note. Yes open source is going to change part of the capitalist system and take away jobs, but hopefully something truly creative and new will be integrated into our economic system.
@franklin:
Indeed great work on the summery. Only make sure to link to the articles that you quoted, as I think this writing and discussion should be made available other readers outside of the context of our class.
Ok, great discussion, guys, wish we had more time to delve into it in class, but we will get a bit more of this critique next week. My thoughts:
@Jason:
It’s important to understand that open source and peer production have both ALREADY CAUGHT ON. It is hard to imagine our lives without the web as we know it today, without the renewed browser war, without Google, without blogging, without Wikipedia… All of these are here to stay and are not waiting to be accepted. The fact you’re still using a Windows or Mac as your PC, doesn’t mean you are not using open source operating systems in your everyday life – like right now: reading, commenting and writing on the Linux machine that is serving your this site.
@Gabriel:
I am with you on the Positive/Negative Liberty. I think while we should be very critical of it CBPP (Commons Based Peer Production) and FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) are leading the way towards a new form of liberty that does indeed take advantage of the self-direction and autonomy of the Negative Liberty while setting structure and practice for distributed generation of public good (without the danger of tyranny). It is probably what I find most interesting about it.
@Sara & @Gordita:
You are right, jobs are being lost. And IMO even worse, some money that should have been payed to the producers is being kept in the pockets of social media entrepreneurs. This phenomenon is indeed scaled to the extreme in crowdsourcing (that Benkler prefers to celebrate). I think there is something problematic about this over-optimism, as it stands in the way of actually achieving these noble goals and creating these new and better economies.
With that being said, you should consider the fact A LOT of jobs are being created, and the type of free market we’re in is exactly what catalyzes it. We need to be critical of exploitation, that is a known phenomenon in new uncharted lands, but hey… that’s exactly why we’re traveling there.
@Ms. Viola Swamp
The question of the community’s awareness and understanding of the radical economies they are helping to give birth to is very important. The event we have at Eyebeam next week will tackle that question directly.
@Gorditamedia:
I think your critique of Gabe and of our collective (/collectivist) excitement is well put. I didn’t mean to assign next week’s reading to Gabe deliberately, but if it didn’t turn out that way, maybe I should have…
The event he mentioned (also in the Upgrade series) in his comment is addressing that directly – posing that question of democracy vs. exploitation and opening a wider symposium at The New School which we should all take not of: The Internet as Playground and Factory: A conference on Digital Labor.
This city has so much to offer… It’s ridiculous…