Metaphors and analogies are always somewhat dangerous: can the governance of a distributed system be compared to a system based on the hierarchical allocation of resources?

Here is an old item from Joi Ito’s blog , by Vinay Gupta, one of the pioneers of the open design movement.

I’m reposting it because it is an important thoughtcapsule about peer governance, and its darker aspects:

Joi Ito:

“I’d like to outline a scenario which makes this visible: suppose a personal grudge of epic proportions grows between the head of an open source project and one of the core developers, and the head simply begins to reject all patches which that the developer works on, essentially barring the developer from further participation in the project.

What recourse does the developer, or the community, have?

* The Developer can simply leave. This is effectively exile: being deprived of participation in something one has invested in is bad. No recourse or resolution has take place (bad)

* The Community can pressure the Head and/or the Developer into behaving reasonably, solving their differences, burying the hatchet, and getting back to work. (good – this is probably the sort of behavior we’d hope to see more often in an emergent-type society)

* The Developer can fork the project and attempt to pull enough support from the Community to make the fork viable, perhaps even displacing the original project.

Now, I’d like to suggest that these three options: exile, social resolution or “civil war” (a code fork being, in some circumstances, as close to a civil war as the open source development process allows) are the resolution possibilities which exist in a feudal society.

If the King is being a bastard, in the feudal past, they either put up with it, leave, attempt to rally the Barons into exerting social pressure, or declare a civil war.

I think that this parallelism indicates that, in many instances, governance of open source projects is essentially a highly functional, singularly effective form of feudalism. Feudal structures worked very well for making sure that the land was secure and productive, and the newness of the Internet might be one reason that a feudal structure is so effective at this stage of homesteading the noosphere.

People invented Parliaments and institutions like the House of Lords to constrain the power of a King. Essentially, they set up systems which had multiple leaders at all times, so that checks and balances were always in force, rather than having rival leaders arise in times of crisis, potentially resulting in destructive wars. The notion that the Opposition must always exist and must always be given power to maintain balance strikes me as a crucial part of how democracy evolved: initially the Barons counterbalanced the King, and then the People counterbalanced both the King and the Lords. In a feudal culture, opposition comes from without. In a democracy, opposition comes from within: it has been coopted and integrated to create a more functional whole.”

Indeed, I think we can see some evidence that this kind of feudal squabble occurs in the Blogosphere, and follows some of these paths to resolution. In placing RSS under the control of third parties, Dave Wiener essentially signed the Magna Carta, limiting his own power for the good of the land, in an attempt to head off a Civil War between the Kingdom of RSS and the Rebels of (n)Echo. “