“Manuel Castells The Information Age Trilogy has been one of the most influential works to understand the societal change in the awake of the digital revolution of the last decades. It is, as Frank Webster (2002: 97) points out, one of “the most illuminating, imaginative and intellectually rigorous account of the major features and dynamics of the world today”. The theory of the network society developed in these books “open[ed] up new perspectives on a word reconstituting itself around a series of networks strung around the globe on the basis of advanced communication technologies” (Stalder, 2006: 1). Indeed, the work of Manuel Castells has influenced a generation of scholars, shaped a research agenda and has got important repercussions beyond academia (Bell, 2007).

Yet, more than two decades after the launch of his theory, the network society and the information age have been developing at a faster pace that anyone suspected in terms of: socio-technological and economic transformation (e.g. platform capitalism, sharing economy, robotization, algorithmic driven society, artificial intelligence and IoT, etc.), power geometries, new identities and socio-political contestation (e.g. populism, indignados, gilet jaunes, alt-right, technopolitics, buen vivir, #meetoo, LGBTIQ, black-lives-matters, youth for climate change, etc.) and new geopolitics and geographies of inequality and power (the rise of China as global power, multipolarity, the emergence of the Global South, the uneven impact of environmental crises, etc.).

At the same time, during the last decades a number of theoretical and epistemological trends have developed or consolidated in the social sciences that can be read as either influenced by or challenging the Trilogy position. Among others, the rise of network theories, mobilities paradigm, communication and power theory, technopolitics, post-colonialism or the relation between digital societies and nature.

In this regard, as 2021 will mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Manuel Castells’, it is time to revisit the trilogy and explore the relevance of Castells’ pioneering work in the light of the current state of the network society and of the ways to research about it. Thus, our aim is to gather together scholars from a wide range of disciplines – Including Castells himself – to engage with the Trilogy and debate on its contributions, legacies but as well shortcomings and new developments not envisioned at the time of its launch to try to develop a critical perspective on future trajectories of the network society and the information age.

We welcome contributions that sympathetically and/or critically engage with the Trilogy in any theoretical, methodological or empirical topic around the contemporary developments of the network society. Examples of areas and themes that we would like to discuss (but are not limited to) are:

• Information, data, datafication and the (new) sources of economic value;
• Networks, space-times, economy and society;
• Contesting the network society power configurations: politics, social movements and new identities;
• The network society in the world: uneven geographies and geopolitics of the information age;
• The Trilogy of the Network Society in front of the new turns in social sciences;
• The influence on the epistemic communities either geographically (e.g. Latin America, Europe, Asia…) or disciplinary (Sociology, media, geography, STS…).

Important dates

Workshop: Barcelona, 10-11 June 2020

• 23/06/2019 → Abstract submission. 500 words + up to 5 keywords
  Submit your proposals to [email protected]
• 23/07/2019 → Communication of abstract acceptance
• 20/3/2020 → Full paper submission: 5.000 – 8.000 words (mandatory). Papers will be the basis for the comments and discussion during the workshop. They will be submitted to a special issue / edited book

Practical Information

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Prof. Manuel Castells (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, University of Southern California)
• Prof. Fernando Calderón (FLACSO, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional San Martín Argentina) 
• Prof. Ida Susser (The City University of New York) 
• Prof. John Thompson (University of Cambridge)

The workshop is free of charge. Food will be provided at the conference for presenters. Accommodation and transportation are not included. 

The workshop presentations should be the basis for a special issue in an international peer-review journal by 2021 to discuss the work of Manuel Castells in the 25th anniversary of the launch of the first volume.

 Organization Committee (IN3)

• Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol
• Ramon Ribera-Fumaz
• David Megías

 Organization

This workshop is organized by the IN3 – Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Open University of Catalonia. The workshop constitutes a central part of the IN3’s 20th anniversary.”

Further info and queries: [email protected]

The post Call for abstracts: The Network Society Today appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About the Symposium

We are delighted to invite proposals for papers for the International Research Symposium on Post-Automation? Towards Democratic Alternatives to Industry 4.0, taking place at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, 11-13 September 2019. The Symposium uses a workshop format to explore the idea of post-automation, critically and constructively. Theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded papers are invited that address what a “post-automation” vantage point might bring to ongoing debates about how societies produce and consume, in light of social concern for sustainable developments, dignified work and social justice, and a business-led push for Industry 4.0 and circular economy.

Post-automation is a concept in the making. The idea is sparked by the observation that, globally, groups of people are appropriating and hacking digital technologies for design, prototyping, and manufacture that were implicated initially in successive waves of automation: code, sensors, actuators, computer numerically controlled machine tools, design software, microelectronics, internet platforms, 3D scanners/printers, video, etc. Yet, in place of work through typical in automation, such as enhanced appearing simultaneously productivity, managerial control, economic growth, people are subverting these technologies for other purposes – human creativity, dignified work, and sustainable production and consumption – and situating these activities in non-industrial and new-industrial spaces. The Symposium will interrogate these technological turnarounds: from their human-displacing and human-disciplining origins, through to the creative experiments and prototypes today. In short, exploring post-automation possibilities.

Clues and hints about post-automation emerge in diverse places: hackerspaces, makerspaces and fablabs; citizen monitoring platforms and open science projects; open hardware platforms and grassroots innovation initiatives; new crafting practices; repair, repurposing and upcycling workshops; libraries and educational institutes opening technology to popular experimentation; citizen laboratories and DIY urbanism; workplace struggles for human-centred, democratic technology. Many of these places work through networks that cut across conventional categories; appearing simultaneously to constitute a movement and infrastructure for social relations with technology radically different to the depopulated visions of cyber-physical systems in Industry 4.0.

An Interdisciplinary Call – Who Should Submit

This call is an invitation for diversity and plurality. Applicants from PhD students to senior Professors are welcome from science and technology studies, sociology of work, social anthropology, engineering, innovation studies, design, geography, sustainability studies, and other relevant areas. The key is to provide an explanation of how your proposed paper can contribute to an open, engaged and collaborative exploration of the idea of post-automation, and to see what work can and cannot be made of that idea. You can propose questions (and answers) that you think should be central to a post-automation research agenda. These might include, for example:

• How can post-automation alter perspectives, understandings and practices in technology-society relations?
• What methods can bring insight, facilitate dialogue, and assist developments in post-automation across the scales of projects, workshops, sectors and societies?
• How is post-automation manifesting in different places and circulating between places, for example across the global North and global South?
• How might social theory in post-automation reframe public debate and move policy beyond reactions to automation, and into proactive alternatives for sustainable technology-society relations?
• How post-automation might help to re-imagine an economy based on commons goods?

How to Apply

I. Please send a 500-word maximum paper abstract and 100-word bio for each author (including contact details and affiliation) as a single document. In both sections, please explain how you relate and contribute to the idea of post-automation. Please email your abstracts as a Word file to [email protected] stating the Symposium title in the subject area of the email. The deadline for abstracts and bios is 20 March 2019.

II. Selected participants will be required to produce a 4,000-5,000 word paper in advance of the Symposium by 15 July 2019 and present it for discussion there. At the Symposium we will read and discuss all the papers, and there will be group activities that map and explore emerging themes.

III. The Symposium will run from 11th September to 13th September 2019 at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Symposium papers will be circulated amongst participants only.

IV. Once papers are accepted, the organisers will negotiate a special issue on post-automation with a leading scientific journal. Participants will contribute revised versions of their paper to the issue, drawing upon insights arising in the Symposium. Revised papers will be submitted to the journal.

V. The Symposium has no fees. Lunch, coffee breaks and the social dinner will be covered by the host organization. The organisers are able to cover the travel and accommodation costs for one author per paper only.

Upcoming Deadlines 2019

• 20 March: Abstracts Submission and Review
• 15 April: Decisions on Abstracts
• 25 July: Papers Submission
• 11-13 September: International Research Symposium
• December: Revised Papers Submitted to Journal for Peer Review”

Organisers

Adrian Smith – Science Policy Research Unit

Mariano Fressoli – Fundación Cenit

More info on this event can be found here.

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More specific, André Rocha and Lucas Barreiro Lemos participated in the “Distributed Design Summit: Creative Minds for Productive Cities” which was held during the Techfestival in Copenhagen, from September 5th to 9th. This festival examined the impact of technology within 10 tracks: Ego, Food, Play, Learn, Create, Work, Start, Cities, Energy and Democracy. The festival included day-long workshops, dynamic activities by local and international co-creators, stage talks, conversations, installations, social meetings, music, after-hour drinks etc. Summits were organised as one-day gatherings where a diverse group of people could discuss the bigger picture, share insights, and challenge best practices.

Special emphasis was placed on the maker movement as a loose global movement of individuals who make physical projects with digital tools through collaborative processes and the sharing of the digital files or documentation.

The two prototypes that were presented by Andre and Lucas were an automated irrigation system and a solar dryer, respectively. The presentations were prepared in accordance with the overall program of the session. Based on the fact that most of the participants were makers and designers, the presentations focused more on the manufacturing process of the solutions rather than their use in agriculture. Also, some details on more practical issues and the efficiency of the solutions were provided together with info on the local Habibi.Works community.

These were the speakers of the Distributed Design Summit in Copenhagen:

More details about the Distributed Design Market Platform project can be found here.

The post Showcasing cultiMake at the TechFestival (Copenhagen) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Find the full article here.

Highlights

• Smart City is a technology-led urban response to global environmental challenges.
• Smart City may imply technological determinism, privatisation and depoliticisation.
• ICT may open the prospect of alternative, non-capitalist urban transformations.
• Degrowth should establish a critical dialogue with ICT-led urban transformations.

Abstract

“The 21st century has been hailed as the urban century and one in which ICT-led transformations will shape urban responses to global environmental change. The Smart City encapsulates all the desires and prospects on the transformative and disruptive role technology will have in solving urban issues both in Global North and Global South cities. Critical scholarship has pointed out that private capital, with the blessing of technocratic elites, has found a techno-environmental fix to both reshuffle economic growth and prevent other alternative politico-ecological transitions to take root in urban systems. Against this bleak outlook, the paper argues that these technological assemblages might be compatible with alternative post-capitalist urban transformations aligned with Degrowth. Through a cross-reading of research on Smart Cities with theoretical perspectives drawn from the literature on Degrowth, I suggest that Degrowth should not refrain from engaging with urban technological imaginaries in a critical and selective way. As the paper shows through alternative uses of Smart technologies and digital open-source fabrication, the question is not so much around technology per se but around the wider politico-economic context into which these technological assemblages are embedded.”

Introduction

“The 21st century will be marked by the critical role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in shaping urban responses to global environmental change. Cities will be both the locus of global environmental problems but also the places where many solutions to these challenges may emerge. The Smart City paradigm has become one of the most important urban strategies to foster green growth and to improve urban sustainability against the backdrop of climate change, austerity politics, inter-urban competition, aging population, rampant social inequality, rapid urbanization, aging infrastructures, high unemployment and stagnant economic growth (Glasmeier and Christopherson, 2015, Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2015, White, 2016). The Smart City articulates a “fantasy city” and utopian vision based on the emancipatory role of technological progress that aims to be the “common sense” of how 21st century cities should look (Gibbs et al., 2013, Hollands, 2008, March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014). In that sense, it “consists of a general but flexible narrative and a common set of logics” for anticipating uncertain global future crisis (White, 2016:574). Cities across the world have embarked on a “quest for technologically enhanced urban management” (Taylor Buck and While, 2015:3) to enable “a more efficient use and organization of urban systems” (Wiig, 2016:538). The global urban scene observes an inter-local competition to attract Smart City investments (Shelton et al., 2015), either to retrofit the existing built environment or to develop neighbourhoods or even to build new cities from scratch.

Since the past few years, the Smart City techno-utopian imaginary is strongly influencing urban debates and shaping contemporary urbanism. Concepts such as ICT, Big Data, sensors, Smart grids, Smart meters, Internet of Things, 3D printers, digital open-source fabrication, circulate not only among large private corporations, start-ups, urban planners, architects and policy makers but are also progressively making headway into the imaginaries of civic organisations, grassroots and social movements.

From a critical viewpoint, one may say that hegemonic corporate notions of the Smart City and cognate concepts built upon entrenched promises of capitalist technological solutionism, ecological modernization and depoliticized environmental improvement, leave small room for post-capitalist alternatives such as Degrowth. However, behind these urban techno-imaginaries and its fetishism of Smart City technologies, there may lay a set of spaces of intersection with non- or post-capitalist projects, which may open up new opportunities for alternative and emancipatory socio-environmental transitions. If cities are said to be both the locus of environmental problems but also the place where solutions may develop, and if techno-modernizing narratives such as the Smart City dominate this debate, how does Degrowth need to position itself in front of these technologically-led urban futures?

This paper aims to open up a critical reflection and dialogue on whether and how ICT and paradigms such as the Smart City may be compatible with an urban Degrowth transition. Through a cross-reading of research on Smart Cities and digital open-source fabrication with theoretical perspectives drawn from the literature on Degrowth, the contribution of this paper is double. First, it argues that Degrowth has paid insufficient attention to the question of technology on the one hand, and to the urban question, on the other hand. Second, it suggests that despite all the problems of urban techno-modernizing imaginaries such as the Smart City (which are identified) there are latent technological possibilities that could inform a Degrowth transition. Beyond presenting a comprehensive review of critical social sciences scholarship on the perils of the Smart City, this article reviews how Smart City technology could be appropriated by grassroots for a progressive urban politics. The example of digital open-source fabrication demonstrates that these technological assemblages could not only be seized to produce data, make visible hidden urban problems and organize contestation, but also to impact upon the way we design, produce and consume at the urban scale. Degrowth should not be a passive observer of this process but may help to inform a process of critical scrutiny, reworking and appropriation of those technologies to enable alternative urban transitions not dictated by the pursuit of economic growth but of socio-environmental justice. In short, this paper argues that a progressive, bottom-up and emancipatory appropriation (or subversion) of ICT and Smart City technologies is possible. However, the paper also shows that this engagement should not solely focus on the technological artefact alone but also on the broader urban political economic context it is inserted in.

After this introduction, the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 I briefly review the main tenets of Degrowth, and I underscore the lack of engagement of Degrowth with the technological and the urban questions. Section 3 documents the emergence of the Smart City concept and shows how it is orchestrating urban transformations in the 21st century. After that, in Section 4 I carry out a comprehensive review of perils associated with current hegemonic understandings of technology-led urban transformations for a transformative and emancipatory socio-environmental Degrowth transition. In Section 5 I discuss how, within this heterogeneous, nebulous and ambiguous techno-utopian urban imaginary, we can find space for subversive, bottom-up strategies that could potentially be aligned with Degrowth. I end up with a concluding section where I argue for a selective and reflexive use of Smart City technology and ICT by Degrowth.”

Find the full article here.

Photo by TERRY KEARNEY

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The P2P Lab is happy to announce the launch of

“The cultiMake project: Crowdsourcing open source agricultural solutions”,

celebrating the gathering of designers, makers and farmers who are adapting to the digitised world.

Where: Habibi.Works, Ioannina (Greece)

When: From Monday, July 30th to Friday, August 3rd.

Currently, the P2P Lab aims to create awareness and promote an emerging collaborative productive model of agriculture, based on the conjunction of commons-based peer production with desktop manufacturing. Agriculture is a key activity in the peripheral and less-developed regions of the EU and a crucial productive sector. It is a field in which ready-to-apply open source hardware and software solutions have already been produced and, thus, can be implemented and improved. Considering the fragmentation of the existing abundant open source projects in relation to agriculture, the replication, sharing and improvement of solutions is hindered.

To facilitate interaction and create feedback loops among makers, designers and farmers, the P2P Lab is organising this 5-day event in Ioannina (Greece). The event will be hosted at Habibi.Works, a makerspace for asylum seekers and Greek locals in Katsikas (Ioannina), managed by the German NGO Soup and Socks e.V. Since 2016, Habibi.Works is operating eight workshop areas which serve as platforms for mutual education, empowerment and encounter.

The main aim is to familiarise the local community with open source technologies developed within the EU and, ideally, connect hubs (e.g. Fab Labs) that provide technical infrastructures for development. This may create a network of open source software/hardware communities and local farmers that overcome barriers through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for their mutual benefit.

During the workshop, four solutions related to agriculture will be manufactured. After publishing an open call and receiving several applications, the local community selected the following designers to lead the manufacturing of the prototypes:

• André Rocha, Adjunct Professor at ESELx – IPL and a Senior Product and Interaction designer.
• Angelos Pappas, Software developer and activist.
• Jonathan Minchin, Coordinator of the Green Fab Lab at Valldaura Labs, IAAC Campus in Barcelona.
• Trifonas Papaioannou, Maker and beekeeper.

The selection of the designers was informed by the following criteria:

• Does the solution create value for small-scale farmers and society?
• Does the solution express empathy to user needs?
• Is the solution visionary and paves the way for others?

The workshop will be open for everyone so we hope you join us there.

For queries, you may contact us at [email protected]

This event is organised in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform Creative Europe project.

Organised by

Supported by

Photo by efou222

The post cultiMake: Crowdsourcing open source agricultural solutions [Open Event] appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Fab City Global Initiative is organising the Fab City Summit in collaboration with the City Hall of Paris and the Fab City Grand Paris Association, and it will take place between Wednesday 11 July and Friday 13 July this year. The extensive program takes place at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. An invitation-only event for City Officials and Representatives from the Fab City network will open the conference on the 11th, presented by Anne Hidalgo (Mayor of the City of Paris) in their capacity as European Capital of Innovation Awardees 2017, and Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation.

The Fab City Lab will be followed by two days of high-profile international speakers at the Fab City conference. This ticketed event includes keynote and conversations with speakers such as Dave Hakkens (Dutch industrial designer and founder of circular economy community Precious Plastic, Neil Gershenfeld (MIT Centre for Bits and Atoms); Saskia Sassen (Professor of Sociology at Columbia University who coined the Global City). A special week-long campus will follow, open to the public from Saturday 14 July and will provide an exciting way for everyone to experience life in a Fab City, with family-friendly hands-on activities, bike tours and fun.

The Paris summit will welcome new cities to the Fab City network, from as far as New Zealand and Brazil. City leaders have identified the network as an invaluable tool for sharing best-practice and concrete experiences in how cities can transition to a future which empowers citizens and ensures productivity and sustainability.

Fab City: A global collaboration project between innovation ecosystems, governments and industry that is enabling the transition to more sustainable and productive cities during the next 36 years. Started in Barcelona in 2014, Fab City stands for human values in the age of technology, and fosters actions and experiments that allow to build new urban futures based on the relocalisation of the production of food, energy and products, and global collaboration. Fab City has been initiated by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, the City Council of Barcelona and the Fab Foundation; it operates within the over 1300 strong Fabrication Laboratories (Fab Labs) global network, using it as a distributed infrastructure for innovation and knowledge source to enable the technology needed for cities to produce everything they consume by 2054. As of 2017, 18 cities are part of the global Fab City network: Barcelona, Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Ekurhuleni, Kerala, Georgia, Shenzhen, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Occitanie Region, Paris, Bhutan, Sacramento, Santiago De Chile, Detroit, Brest, Curitiba.

Join https://summit.fabcity.paris/tickets/

Media Contact: [email protected]

The post Fab City Summit Paris: Changing the Reality of Our Cities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The selection of the designers was made by members of the local community, informed by the following criteria:

• Does the solution create value for small-scale farmers and society?
• Does the solution express empathy to user needs?
• Is the solution visionary and paves the way for others?

The selected designers who will lead the manufacturing of 4 prototypes during the workshop are:

• André Rocha, Adjunct Professor at ESELx – IPL and a Senior Product and Interaction designer.
• Angelos Pappas, Software developer and activist.
• Jonathan Minchin, Coordinator of the Green Fab Lab at Valldaura Labs, IAAC Campus in Barcelona.
• Trifonas Papaioannou, Maker and beekeeper.

We wish to thank all applicants for their contributions. The workshop will take place from July 30 to August 03 at Habibi.Works. It will be open for everyone so we hope you join us there.

We firmly believe in the power of collective creativity.

The post CultiMake: Announcing the Results of the Open Call for Ideas appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This 5-day workshop will be hosted at the intercultural makerspace “Habibi.Works”, which is located in Ioannina (Greece).

More details on this call, along with the application form may be found in the following document.

DDMP-cultiMake by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Deadline: 25 June 2018 22:00 CET.

This event is organised in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform (DDMP) Creative Europe project.

The post Open call for ideas: Crowdsourcing open source agricultural solutions appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abstract

“Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other without a traditional hierarchical organisation to produce common and public goods, such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux. There is a need to understand how these communities govern and organise themselves as they grow in size and complexity. Following an ethnographic approach, this thesis explores the emergence of and changes in the organisational structures and processes of Drupal: a large and global CBBP community which, over the past fifteen years, has coordinated the work of hundreds of thousands of participants to develop a technology which currently powers more than 2% of websites worldwide. Firstly, this thesis questions and studies the notion of contribution in CBPP communities, arguing that contribution should be understood as a set of meanings which are under constant negotiation between the participants according to their own internal logics of value. Following a constructivist approach, it shows the relevance played by less visible contribution activities such as the organisation of events. Secondly, this thesis explores the emergence and inner workings of the sociotechnical systems which surround contributions related to the development of projects and the organisation of events. Two intertwined organisational dynamics were identified: formalisation in the organisational processes and decentralisation in decision-making. Finally, this thesis brings together the empirical data from this exploration of socio-technical systems with previous literature on self-organisation and organisation studies, to offer an account of how the organisational changes resulted in the emergence of a polycentric model of governance, in which different forms of organisation varying in their degree of organicity co-exist and influence each other.”

Summary (excerpted from preface)

“This thesis presents a study of self-organisation in a collaborative community focused on the development of a Free/Libre Open Source Software, named Drupal, whose model responds to the latter: a Commons-Based Peer Production community. Drupal is a content management framework, a software to develop web applications, which currently powers more than 2% of websites worldwide. Since the source code, the computer instructions, was released under a license which allow its use, copy, study and modification by anyone in 2001, the Drupal project has attracted the attention of hundreds of thousands of participants. More than 1.3 million people are registered on Drupal.org, the main platform of collaboration, and communitarian events are held every week all around the World. Thus, as the main slogan of the Drupal project reflects — “come for the software, stay for the community”, this collaborative project cannot be understood without exploring its community, which is the main focus of this thesis.

In sum, over the course of the next eleven chapters, this thesis presents the story of how hundreds of thousands of participants in a large and global Commons-Based Peer Production community have organised themselves, in what started as a small and amateur project in 2001. This is with the aim of furthering our understanding of how, coping with diverse challenges, Commons-Based Peer Production communities govern and scale up their self-organisational processes.

* Chapter 1 provides an overview of the phenomenon of Free/Libre Open Source Software and connects it with that of Commons-Based Peer Production, allowing the theoretical pillars from previous studies on both phenomena to be drawn on.

* Chapter 2 provides an overview of the main case study, the Drupal community. Throughout the second chapter the Drupal community is framed as an extreme case study of Commons-Based Peer Production on the basis of its growth, therefore offering an opportunity to improve our understanding of how self-organisational processes emerge, evolve and scale up over time in Commons-Based Peer Production communities of this type.

* Chapter 3 provides an overview of Activity Theory and its employment as an analytical tool: a lens which supports the analysis of the changes experienced in complex organisational activities, such as those from Free/Libre Open Source Software communities as part of the wider phenomenon of Commons-Based Peer Production.

* Chapter 4, explores the fundamental methodological aspects considered for this study, which draws on an ethnographic approach. The decision for this approach is reasoned on the basis of the nature of the research questions tackled in the study. Firstly, on requiring an inductive approach, which entails the assumption that topics emerge from the process of data analysis rather than vice versa. Secondly, on the necessity of drawing on a methodological approach which acknowledges the need to understand these topics from within the community.

* Chapter 5 begins the presentation of the findings of this study. It presents the findings regarding the study of contribution in the Drupal community, a notion which is fundamental for the choice of the main unit of analysis, contribution activity, in Activity Theory. The results from this study enabled the identification and consideration, throughout the subsequent chapters, not only of activities which are “officially” understood as contributions, such as those listed in the main collaboration platform, but also of those which have remained less visible in Free/Libre Open Source software and Commons-Based Peer Production communities and the literature on them.

* Chapters 6 and 7 address the study of the development of projects, activities whose main actions and operations are mostly performed through an online medium;

* Chapters 8 and 9 present the main argument that binds this thesis together: the growth experienced by the Drupal community led to a formalisation of self-organisational processes in response to a general dynamic of decentralisation of decision-making in order for these processes to scale up. This research identified these two general organisational dynamics, formalisation and decentralisation of decision-making, affecting large and global Commons-Based Peer Production communities as they grow over time. Thus, throughout these chapters, the means by which these general dynamics of formalisation and decentralisation shaped the overall systems which emerged around these different contribution activities are explored. The exploration of the organisational processes of this case study does not only show the existence of these dynamics, but it provides an in-depth account of how these dynamics relate to each other, as well as how they shaped the overall resulting system of peer production, despite the main medium of the peer production activities studied being online/offline, or the significant differences with regard to their main focus of action — writing source code or organising events. For each pair of chapters this exploration starts with the most informal systems and progresses towards the most formal respectively: custom, contributed and core projects, in chapters 6 and 7; and local events, DrupalCamps and DrupalCons, in chapters 8 and 9. After carrying out this in-depth exploration of self-organisation, the overall identified changes experienced in the self-organisational processes of the Drupal community are brought together according to general theories of self-organising communities, organisational theory and empirical studies on Commons-Based Peer Production communities, in order to connect the exploration with macro organisational aspects in chapter 10.

* Chapter 10 argues that this study provides evidence of the emergence of polycentric governance, in which the participants of this community establish a constant process of negotiation to distribute authority and power over several centres of governance with effective coordination between them. In addition, this chapter argues that the exploration carried out throughout the previous chapters provides an in-depth account of the emergence of an organisational system for peer production in which different forms of organisation, varying in their degree of organicity, simultaneously co-exist and interact with each other.

* Finally, chapter 11 summarises the main contributions of this thesis and provides a set of implications for practitioners of Commons-Based Peer Production communities.”

The full thesis is available here.

Photo by Fernan Federici

The post Essay of the Day: Self-Organisation in Commons-Based Peer Production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“If we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points as they emerge and devise mechanisms of recreating diversity of constraint and degrees of freedom in the network to work around these forms of reconcentrated power.”

Abstract

“The original Internet design combined technical, organizational, and cultural characteristics that decentralized power along diverse dimensions. Decentralized institutional, technical, and market power maximized freedom to operate and innovate at the expense of control. Market developments have introduced new points of control. Mobile and cloud computing, the Internet of Things, fiber transition, big data, surveillance, and behavioral marketing introduce new control points and dimensions of power into the Internet as a social-cultural-economic platform. Unlike in the Internet’s first generation, companies and governments are well aware of the significance of design choices, and are jostling to acquire power over, and appropriate value from, networked activity. If we are to preserve the democratic and creative promise of the Internet, we must continuously diagnose control points as they emerge and devise mechanisms of recreating diversity of constraint and degrees of freedom in the network to work around these forms of reconcentrated power.”

The full article is available here.

Photo by abraham.williams

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