Distinguishing Open Commons Organizations from Open Business Organizations
Pure peer production is essentially a form of non-reciprocal generalized exchange, in which everyone contributes voluntarily to his ability and can use according to need.
But such projects do need a measure of infrastructure and institutionalization, i.e. a codified form of property (the GPL, CC or associated licenses), and some form of governance. Thus such projects may elect to create a formal organization, an Open Commons Organization, such as the Apache Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, etc… Such projects are based on self-selection, equipotentiality, holoptism and the various characteristics we have discussed in the past.
They are best called for-benefit organizations (non-profit and non-governmental are not appropriate concepts as they start from the primacy of business or government, instead of civil society itself). Such organizations and their volunteers build a commons. If such organizations earn money, it can be invested in infrastructure (servers, conferences, etc..), in a very small core of technical staff, but it is unwise to use such finances to pay for the volunteer labour, as this would in fact crowd out volunteerism.
Now, some of the value created by such OCO’s might be monetized, and an Open Business Organization may be used as a vehicle for this. If it is to be an open organization, it should be based on using open and free raw material, and forsake of copyrights; its processes should be participative, and it should itself contribute to the Commons, by creating a positive ecology with it. But an Open Business Organization operates in the market, it works with scarce resources that can be priced, and so it is concerned with the equity and fairness of its distribution of wealth, essentially amongst those creating the derivative value, i.e. its workers. It would seem to me that for such to be the case, a truly open organization would be following some kind of cooperative or nonprofit format.
This is not to exclude that a traditional business organization can partially open itself up; but if it uses a for-profit mode of operation based on the priority of its shareholders, then it is clear that at least one of the 3 legs of openness will be missing: that of true participation.
