Three contributions on this important topic:

Summarizing and commenting on John Heron’s views on Hierarchy for Autonomy:

In true peer to peer networks, Heron writes, the role of hierarchy is to enable the spontaneous emergence of ‘autonomy in cooperation’:

“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:

(1) autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;

(2) narrow democratic cultures which practice political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;

(3) wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;

(4) commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavor.”

Heron adds that “These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

(1) Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;

(2) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;

(3) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;

(4) The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor

From all of the above, we can conclude that hierarchy does not disappear in peer to peer processes, but that it changes its nature. Hierarchy, or authority ranking as it is called by Alan Fiske, takes on new forms such as peer governance, servant leadership, multistakeholdership.

To enlarge my point (4) about the role of hierarchy in p2p cultures:

Hierarchy here is the creative leadership which seeks to promote the values of autonomy and co-operation in a peer to peer association. Such leadership, as in the free software movement, is exercised in two ways. First, by the one or more people who take initiatives to set up such an association. And second, once the association is up and running, as spontaneous rotating leadership among the peers, when anyone takes initiatives that further enhance the autonomy and co-operation of other participating members.

This also mirrored in the action research method of co-operative inquiry. Someone launches an inquiry, co-opts participating co-inquirers, and initiates them into the methodology. Once they have internalized it, a genuine peer inquiry is under way with different members at different times taking spontaneous leadership initiatives which raise key issues for peer decision-making and thereby take the inquiry in fruitful directions.

2. Felix Stadler on Meritocratic Leadership:

“The openness in open source is often misunderstood as egalitarian collaboration. However, FOSS is primarily open in the sense that anyone can appropriate the results, and do with them whatever he or she wants (within the legal/normative framework set out by the license). This is what the commons, a shared resource, is about. Free appropriation. Not everyone can contribute. Everyone is free, indeed, to propose a contribution, but the people who run the project are equally free to reject the contribution outright. Open source projects, in their actual organization, are not egalitarian and not everyone is welcome. The core task of managing a commons is to ensure not just the production of resources, but also to prevent its degradation from the addition of low quality material.

Organizationally the key aspects of FOSS projects are that participation is voluntary and – what is often forgotten – that they are tightly structured. Intuitively, this might seem like a contradiction, but in practice it is not. Participation is voluntary in a double sense. On the one hand, people decide for themselves if they want to contribute. Tasks are never assigned, but people volunteer to take responsibility. On the other hand, if contributors are not happy with the project’s development, they can take all the project’s resources (mainly, the source code) and reorganize it differently. Nevertheless, all projects have a leader, or a small group of leaders, who determine the overall direction of the projects and which contributions from the community are included in the next version, and which are rejected. However, because of the doubly voluntary nature, the project leaders need to be very responsive to the community, otherwise the community can easily get rid of them (which is called ‘forking the project’). The leader has no other claim for his (and it seems to be always a man) position than to be of service to the community. Open Source theorist Eric S. Raymond has called this a benevolent dictatorship.[11] More accurately, it is called the result of a voluntary hierarchy in which authority flows from responsibility (rather than from the power to coerce).

Thus, the FOSS world is not a democracy, where everyone has a vote, but a meritocracy, where the proven experts – those who know better than others what they are doing and do it reliably and responsibly – run the show. The hierarchical nature of the organization directly mirrors this meritocracy. The very good programmers end up on top, the untalented ones either drop out voluntarily, or, if they get too distracting, are kicked out. Most often, this is not an acrimonious process, because in coding, it’s relatively easy to recognize expertise, for the reasons mentioned earlier. No fancy degrees are necessary. You can literally be a teenager in a small town in Norway and be recognized as a very talented programmer.[13] Often it’s a good strategy to let other people solve problems more quickly than one could oneself, since usually their definition of the problem and the solution is very similar to one’s own. Thus, accepting the hierarchical nature of such projects is easy. It is usually very transparent and explicit. The project leader is not just a recognized crack, but also has to lead the project in a way that keeps everyone reasonably happy. The hierarchy, voluntary as it may be, creates numerous mechanisms of organizational closure, which allows a project to remain focused and limits the noise/signal ratio of communication to a productive level.

Without an easy way to recognize expertise, it is very hard to build such voluntary hierarchies based on a transparent meritocracy, or other filters that increase focus and manage the balance between welcoming people who can really contribute and keeping out those who do not.”

3. Hierarchy in Distributed Networks. By David de Ugarte.

Excerpted from the book: The Power of Networks

“The capacity to transmit is the capacity to bring people together, to summon up the collective will, to act. The capacity to transmit is a precondition for political action.

And in every decentralised structure, such a capacity really is exclusive to very few nodes. In distributed networks, by definition, nobody depends exclusively on anyone else in order to send his message to a third party. There are no unique filters. In both kinds of network “everything is connected to everything,” but in distributed networks the difference lies in the fact that any transmitter doesn’t have to always go necessarily through the same nodes in order to reach others. A local newspaper doesn’t have to sell its version of an event to an agency journalist who has just come to the area, and a local politician in a village doesn’t need to convince all his regional and provincial colleagues in order to reach his fellow party members in other parts of the country. Don’t distributed networks have political forms of organisation then? The thing is that we have become so used to living within decentralised power networks that we tend to confuse the organisation of representation with the organisation of collective action. The perversion of decentralisation has reached such a degree that “democracy” has become synonymous with electing representatives – that is, filter nodes.

What defines a distributed network is, as Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist say, that every individual agent decides for himself, but lacks the capacity and opportunity to decide for any of the other agents.

In this sense, every distributed network is a network between equals, even though some nodes may be better connected than others. But what is important is that, within such a system, decision making is not binary. It’s not a matter of “yes” or “no”. It’s a matter of “to a greater or lesser degree.”

Someone makes a proposal and everyone who wishes to join in can do so. The range of the action in question will depend on the degree to which the proposal is accepted. This system is called a pluriarchy, and, according to the same authors, it makes it impossible to maintain the fundamental notion of democracy, where the majority decide for the minority whenever there are disagreements. Even if the majority not only disagreed with a proposal, but also acted against it, it wouldn’t be able to prevent the proposal from being carried out. Democracy is in this sense a scarcity system: the collective must face an either/or choice, between one filter and another, between one representative and another.

It is easy to see why there is no conventional “direction” within pluriarchic networks. But you can also see that it is inevitable that groups will arise whose aim will be to bring about a greater ease of flow within networks. These are groups that specialise in proposing and facilitating group action. They are usually inwards rather than outwards-oriented, although in the end they are inevitably taken for representatives of the whole of the network or, at least, for an embodiment of the identity that defines them. Members of these groups are netocrats within each network – in a certain sense, network leaders, as they cannot make decisions but can use their own careers, their prestige, and their identification with the values of the whole or a part of the network to call for group action.

What happens when a distributed structure clashes with a decentralised one?

The decentralised structure has the upper hand when it comes to mobilisation capabilities and speed. In recent years, there have been plenty of examples of rulers who have thought that controlling traditional filters (i.e. press and TV) would be enough to condition the citizenship by ensuring that only the most convenient pieces of news reached them. However, the emergence of the new information networks led them to come up against thousand of citizens who had taken to the streets. In some cases (Philippines, Spain, etc.), it has led them to resign. But what matters most is not so much the result of those demonstrations as what they were symptoms of.

Thousands of pages have been written trying to fathom where the power of text messages, the electronic “word of mouth”, lies, but that is really only the tip of the iceberg. The truth is that these cyberthrongs would have been unthinkable in the absence of a new distributed mode of communication.”