First Monday has an interesting article by Jill Coffin, which reviews 3 case studies where peer governance models are being practiced: Wikipedia, Burning Man, and ThinkCycle.

For more on forms of peer governance, see our topical area on ‘P2P Governance Concepts‘ page.

Here are the conclusions of the study:

“The free software and open source collaborative models represent an alternative approach to collaborative development that has evolved along with network technologies. Because the free software and open source communities collaborated under historically novel circumstances, they discovered novel collaboration methodologies. These methodologies need not be limited to software development, especially given the distributed, networked nature of contemporary society. Lessons for collaborative communities learned from this analysis of three non-hacker, collaborative communities are summarized as follows.

The benevolent dictator and early project adopters create an essential social fabric by establishing and asserting project mores, protocol and ethos. A lack of assertion of these mores, protocol and ethos at crucial time during the evolution of the community can lead to instability, as in the case of Black Rock City. Relative absence of these figures can lead to lack of project robustness, as in the case of ThinkCycle.

Hybrid political systems consisting of anarchy, dictatorship and meritocratic bureaucracy support the project when the political system is transparent and the dictator is trusted. Wikipedia is particularly successful in this respect.

Project transparency, particularly open, recorded dialog and peer review of project materials, discussion and decisions lead to trust among members, a recorded institutional history and efficient debugging. The institutional history can serve to revert project to a stable state, inform members of decisions, and help members understand the rationale behind decisions. Again, Wikipedia is particularly successful in this respect.

A community–wide sense of project ownership and a reward system can replace capital in collaborative projects. This sense of ownership rewards participants for their personal investment and in some cases contributes to their identity.

An asynchronous, geographically distributed membership coordinated through an effective platform facilitates transparency and project metalayers such as recorded histories and discussions. It also thwarts the tendency for opaque co-located power centers to develop, as in the case of Black Rock City, or the platform to become an archive, as in the case of ThinkCycle.

Members should be active participants, otherwise focus can be lost. Also, discussion about the project should not infect project content. These layers should be separate, but related.”