Two items to help you think through the ‘hybridity’ of peer governance.

The journal Science Studies has an interesting case study, which examines the interlocking of three levels of control in a open source project, nl. self-control (individual autonomy), more central control by a group of core developers, and the distributed control by peers.

Read: The Functioning of a Free Software Community: Entanglement of Three Regulation Modes РControl, Autonomous and Distributed. Didier Demazi̬re, Fran̤ois Horn and Marc Zune. Science Studies, Volume 20/2007, Number 2 .

The second item is a blog entry by Kevin Kelly, “The Bottom is Not Enough“, in which he reviews, ten years after, his insights on bottom-up swarming and hive minds, which he studied in his seminal “Out of Control”. His conclusion is that every bottom-up process needs a measure of top-down.

An excerpt:

“It is important to remember how dumb the bottom is in essence. In biological natural selection, the prime architect is death. Death powers evolutionary selection. Death is one binary bit. Either off or on. What’s dumber than that? So the hive-mind of evolution is powered by one-bit intelligence. That’s why it takes millions of years to do much.

We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it.

What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos:

1) dumb writers, smart filters, no editors.

2) smart writers, dumb filters, no editors

3) smart editors, smart filters, no writers
…ad infinitum.

The exhilarating frontier today is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-of-control creation with various levels of top-down control. We are rushing into an expanding possibility space never accessible before. It’s the 5th dimension of “no one is as smart as everyone.” A recurring insight (but still worth exploring) is simply: what happens if we turn it inside out and have the audience/customers in charge? As Clay Shirky puts it: here comes everybody! But pure unadulterated dumb mobs is the easiest, perhaps least interesting new space in the entire constellation of possibilities. More potent, more unknown, are the many other combinations of everyone and someone. .”