P2P Foundation

Jimmy Wales: “And if a person‘s really smart and they‘re doing fantastic work I don‘t care if they‘re a high school kid or a Harvard professor, it‘s the work that matters. And you can‘t coast on your credentials on Wikipedia. You have to – you have to enter the marketplace of ideas and engage with people.â€?

Jorge Ferrer: “equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (intellectually, emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better than others. It is important to experience human equality from this perspective to avoid trivializing our encounter with others as being merely equal.”

Robert Fuller: “No child – no human being – is expendable. Everyone has something to contribute, and when that contribution is made and acknowledged, he or she feels like a somebody. Helping individuals locate that something and contribute it is the proper business of education.”

This is a reprint from P2P News 100.

Michel Bauwens: From a discussion on the Oekonux mailing list, I have been trying to sort out the difference between the modernist tradition of peer review, and the new practices of communal validation on the internet. Though the latter descends from the former, it is not the same.
In the modernist paradigm, based on credentialism, before you can participate, you have to be credentialed. For example, you cannot discuss physics if you do not have a PhD in it, your article won’t even be considered. The selection mechanism is inbuilt in the protocol. Similarly, in traditional journalism, only a reporter can write a story. In both cases the process consists of the principle: first filter, then publish.

Now take the new peer processes. You are not asked any degree to participate in a free software project; you are not asked to be a reporter in citizen journalism; you are not asked to be a scientist in citizen science projects. It’s, ‘first publish, then filter’. This is the input side.

Now the processing side. In modernist organisations, it’s either hierarchy or the market or peer review by credentialled peers in scientific settings; not so in peer projects, the filtering is communal, done by the community itself, even though some members of the community might have more weight than others. There are sometimes elaborate processes involved, but it still would differ from traditional peer review, as can be seen in Slashdot, Kuroshin, etc..

Now let’s look at the output side. In modernist organisations, there is usually proprietary lockout, the right of exclusion, or the need to pay, or distribution on a ‘need to know’ basis in corporate settings. In science, access to peer-reviewed journals is very expensive and restricted to academic settings. This is what the peer-based open access or open science movement wants to change, by insuring free access online. In peer production: do you restrict usage to free software, do you forbid anyone to use the wikipedia? You don’t.

These three processes are convergent towards wider participation, are they not?

Of course, some programs are made for minorities, but even if they are, within that context, they still obey to the 3 characteristics just described.

Equipotentiality, or anti-credentialism, is that process of allowing for self-selection of participants, followed by communal validation, followed by open access. If you know a better word for it, fine, but it is this that I mean. The a priori decision to open participation to anyone that has the potential to have the right skills, rather than to anyone with credentials.