In this post, we analyze Wikipedia — a site that has achieved tremendous success and scale through crowd-sourcing human input to create one of the Internet’s greatest public goods. Wikipedia’s success is particularly impressive considering that the site is owned and operated by a non-profit organization, and that almost all of its content is contributed by unpaid volunteers.

The non-commercial, volunteer-driven nature of Wikipedia may cause developers from the “decentralized web” to question the site’s relevance. However, these differences may be merely cosmetic: IPFS, for example, has no inherent commercial model, and most of the open source projects that underlie the decentralized web are built, at least in part, by volunteers.

We believe that a site that has managed to coordinate so many people to produce such remarkable content is well worth a look as we search for solutions to similar problems in the emerging decentralized web.

To better understand Wikipedia’s success, we first survey some key features of Wikipedia’s battle-tested (to the tune of 120,000 active volunteer editors) coordination mechanisms. Next, we present some valuable high-level lessons that blockchain projects interested in human input might learn from Wikipedia’s approach. Finally, we explore vulnerabilities inherent to Wikipedia’s suite of mechanisms, as well as the defenses it has developed to such attacks.

Wikipedia: key elements

While we cannot hope to cover all of Wikipedia’s functionality in this short post, we start by outlining a number of Wikipedia’s foundational coordination mechanisms as background for our analysis.

User and article Talk Pages

While anyone can edit an article anonymously on Wikipedia, most regular editors choose to register with the organization and gain additional privileges. As such, most editors, and all articles, have a public metadata page known as a talk page, for public conversations about the relevant user or article. Talk pages are root-level collaborative infrastructure: they allow conversations and disputes to happen frequently and publicly.

Since talk pages capture a history of each editor’s interaction — both in terms of encyclopedia content and conversational exchanges with other editors — they also provide the basis for Wikipedia’s reputation system.

Clear and accessible rules

If we think of the collection of mechanisms Wikipedia uses to coordinate its editors as a kind of “social protocol”, the heart of that protocol would surely be its List of Guidelines and List of Policies, developed and enforced by the community itself. According to the Wikipedia page on Policies and Guidelines:

“Wikipedia policies and guidelines are developed by the community… Policies are standards that all users should normally follow, and guidelines are generally meant to be best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.”

For many coming from a blockchain background, such policies and guidelines will likely seem far too informal to be of much use, especially without monetary or legal enforcement. And yet, the practical reality is that these mechanisms have been remarkably effective at coordinating Wikipedia’s tens of thousands of volunteer editors over almost two decades, without having to resort to legal threats or economic incentives for enforcement.

Enforcement: Peer consensus and volunteer authority

Upon hearing that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, no money is staked, no contracts are signed, and neither paid police nor smart contracts are available to enforce the guidelines, an obvious question is: why are the rules actually followed?

Wikipedia’s primary enforcement strategy is peer-based consensus. Editors know that when peer consensus fails, final authority rests with certain, privileged, volunteer authorities with long-standing reputations at stake.

Peer consensus

As an example, let’s consider three of the site’s most fundamental content policies, often referred to together. “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), “No Original Research” (NOR), and “Verifiability” (V) evolved to guide editors towards Wikipedia’s mission of an unbiased encyclopedia.

If I modify the Wikipedia page for Mahatma Gandhi, changing his birthdate to the year 1472, or offering an ungrounded opinion about his life or work, there is no economic loss or legal challenge. Instead, because there is a large community of editors who do respect the policies (even though I do not), my edit will almost certainly be swiftly reverted until I can credibly argue that my changes meet Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (“Neutral Point of View” and “Verifiability”, in this case).

Such discussions typically take place on talk pages, either the editor’s or the article’s, until consensus amongst editors is achieved. If I insist on maintaining my edits without convincing my disputants, I risk violating other policies, such as 3RR (explained below), and attracting the attention of an administrator.

Volunteer authority: Administrators and Bureaucrats

When peer consensus fails, and explicit authority is needed to resolve a dispute, action is taken by an experienced volunteer editor with a long and positive track record: an Administrator.

Administrators have a high degree of control over content, include blocking and unblocking users, editing protected pages, and deleting and undeleting pages. Because there are relatively few of them (~500 active administrators for English Wikipedia), being an administrator is quite an honor. Once nominated, adminship is determined through discussion on the user’s nomination page, not voting, with a volunteer bureaucrat gauging the positivity of comments at the end of the discussion. In practice, those candidates having more than 75% positive comments tend to pass.

Bureaucrats are the highest level of volunteer authority in Wikipedia, and are also typically administrators as well. While administrators have the final say for content decisions, bureaucrats hold the ultimate responsibility for adding and removing all kinds of user privileges, including adminship. Like administrators, bureaucrats are determined through community discussion and consensus. However, they are even rarer: there are currently only 18 for the entire English Wikipedia.

Since there is no hard limit to the number of administrators and bureaucrats, promotion is truly meritocratic.

Evolving governance

Another notable aspect of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines is that they can change over time. And in principle, changing a Wikipedia policy or guideline page is no different than changing any other page on the site.

The fluidity of the policies and guidelines plays an important role in maintaining editors’ confidence in enforcing the rules. After all, people are much more likely to believe in rules that they helped create.

If we continue to think of the policies and guidelines for Wikipedia as a kind of protocol, we would say that the protocol can be amended over time and that the governance for its evolution takes place in-protocol — that is, as a part of the protocol itself.

Lessons for the decentralized web

Now that we have a little bit of background on Wikipedia’s core mechanisms, we will delve into the ways that Wikipedia’s approach to coordination differs from similar solutions in public blockchain protocols. There are three areas where we believe the decentralized web may have lessons to learn from Wikipedia’s success: cooperative games, reputation, and an iterative approach to “success”.

We also hope that these lessons may apply to our problem of generating trusted seed sets for Osrank.

Blockchain should consider cooperative games

Examining Wikipedia with our blockchain hats on, one thing that jumps out right away is that pretty much all of Wikipedia’s coordination games are cooperative rather than adversarial. For contrast, consider Proof of Work as it is used by the Bitcoin network. Because running mining hardware costs money in the form of electricity and because only one node can get the reward in each block, the game is inherently zero-sum: when I win, I earn a block reward; every other miner loses money. It is the adversarial nature of such games that leaves us unsurprised when concerns like selfish mining start to crop up.

As an even better example, consider Token Curated Registries (TCRs). We won’t spend time describing the mechanics of TCRs here, because we plan to cover the topic in more detail in a later post. But for now, the important thing to know is that TCRs allow people to place bets, with real money, on whether or not a given item will be included in a list. The idea is that, like an efficient market, the result of the betting will converge to produce the correct answer.

One problem with mechanisms like TCRs is that many people have a strong preference against playing any game in which they have a significant chance of losing — even if they can expect their gains to make up for their losses over time. In behavioral psychology, this result is known as loss aversion and has been confirmed in many real-world experiments.

In short, Proof of Work and TCRs are both adversarial mechanisms for resolving conflicts and coming to consensus. To see how Wikipedia resolves similar conflicts using cooperative solutions, let’s dive deeper into what dispute resolution looks like on the site.

Dispute resolution

So how does a dubious change to Mahatma Gandhi’s page actually get reverted? In other words, what is the process by which that work gets done?

When a dispute first arises, Wikipedia instructs the editors to avoid their instinct to revert or overwrite each other’s edits, and to take the conflict to the article’s talk page instead. Some quotes from Wikipedia’s page on Dispute Resolution point to the importance of the Talk pages:

“Talking to other parties is not a mere formality, but an integral part of writing the encyclopedia”

“Sustained discussion between the parties, even if not immediately successful, demonstrates your good faith and shows you are trying to reach a consensus.”

Editors who insist on “edit warring”, or simply reverting another editor’s changes without discussion, risk violating Wikipedia’s 3RR policy, which prohibits editors from reverting 3 changes on a given page in 24 hours. Editors who violate 3RR risk a temporary suspension of their accounts.

If initial efforts by the editors to communicate on the Talk Page fail, Wikipedia offers many additional solutions for cooperative coordination, including:

• Editor Assistance provides one-on-one advice on how to conduct a civil, content-focused discussion from an experienced editor.
• Moderated Discussion offers the facilitation help of an experienced moderator, and is only available after lengthy discussion on the article’s Talk page.
• 3rd Opinion, matches the disputants with a third, neutral opinion, and is only available for disputes involving only people.
• Community Input allows the disputants to get input from a (potentially) large number of content experts.

Binding arbitration from the Arbitration Committee is considered the option of last resort, and is the only option in which the editors are not required to come to a consensus on their own. According to Wikipedia’s index of arbitration cases, this mechanism has been invoked only 513 times since 2004 — a strong vote of confidence for its first-pass dispute resolution mechanisms.

A notable theme of all of these dispute resolution mechanisms is how uniformly cooperative they are. In particular, it is worth observing that in no case can any editor lose something of significant economic value, as they might, for instance, if a TCR was used to resolve the dispute.

What the editor does lose, if their edit does not make it into the encyclopedia, is whatever time and work she put into the edit. This risk likely incentivises editors to make small, frequent contributions rather than large ones and to discuss major changes with other editors before starting work on them.

“Losing” may not even be the right word. As long as the author of the unincluded edit believes in Wikipedia’s process as a whole, she may still view her dispute as another form of contribution to the article. In fact, reputation-wise, evidence of a well-conducted dispute only adds credibility to the user accounts of the disputants.

Reputation without real-world identity can work

Another lesson from Wikipedia relates to what volunteer editors have at stake and how the site’s policies use that stake to ensure their good behavior on the system.

Many blockchain systems require that potential participants stake something of real-world value, typically either a bond or an off-chain record of good “reputation”. For example, in some protocols, proof-of-stake validators risk losing large amount of tokens if they don’t follow the network’s consensus rules. In other networks, governors or trustees might be KYC’d with the threat of legal challenge, or public disapproval, if they misbehave.

Wikipedia appears to have found a way to incentivize participants’ attachment to their pseudonyms without requiring evidence of real-world identity. We believe this is because reputation in Wikipedia’s community is based on a long-running history of small contributions that is difficult and time-consuming to fake, outsource, or automate.

Once an editor has traded anonymity for pseudonymity and created a user account, the first type of reputation that is typically considered is their “edit count”. Edit count is the total number of page changes that the editor has made during his or her history of contributing to Wikipedia. In a sense, edit count is a human version of proof-of-work, because it provides a difficult-to-fake reference for the amount of work the editor has contributed to the site.

If edit count is the simplest quantitative measure of a user’s total reputation on the site, its qualitative analog is the user talk pages. Talk pages provide a complete record of the user’s individual edits, as well as a record of administrative actions that have been taken against the user, and notes and comments by other users. The Wikipedia community also offers many kinds of subjective awards which contribute to editor reputation.

Reputable editors enjoy privileges on Wikipedia that cannot be earned in any other way — in particular, a community-wide “benefit of the doubt”. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual’s page on vandalism and spam provides a good high-level overview, instructing editors who encounter a potentially problematic edit to first visit the author’s talk page. Talk pages with lots of edits over time indicate the author should be assumed to be acting in good faith, and notified before their questionable edit is reverted: “In the rare case that you think there’s a problem with an edit from this kind of editor, chances are you’ve misunderstood something.”

On the other hand, the same source’s recommendations for questionable edits by anonymous editors, or editors with empty talk pages, are quite different: “If you see a questionable edit from this kind of user account, you can be virtually certain it was vandalism.”

Blockchains which adopt similar reputation mechanisms might expect to see two major changes: slower evolution of governance and sticky users. And while no public blockchains that we’re aware of have made significant use of pseudonymous reputation, it’s worth noting that such mechanisms have played a significant role in the increasing adoption of the Dark Web.

Assigning power based on a long history of user edits means that the composition of the governing class necessarily changes slowly and predictably, and is therefore less subject to the “hostile takeovers” that are a fundamental risk for many token-voting-based schemes.

Sticky users are a consequence of the slow accretion of power: experienced users tend to stick to their original pseudonym precisely because it would be time-consuming to recreate a similar level of privilege (both implicit and explicit) under a new identity.

All in all, Wikipedia’s reputation system may represent an excellent compromise between designs offering total anonymity on one hand and identity models built on personally identifying information on the other. In particular, such a system has the benefit of allowing users to accrue reputation over time and resisting Sybil attacks by punishing users if and when they misbehave. At the same time, it also allows users to preserve the privacy of their real-world identities if they wish.

Iteration over finality

Wikipedia’s encyclopedic mission, by its very nature, can never be fully completed. As such, the site’s mechanisms do not attempt to resolve conflicts quickly or ensure the next version of a given page arrives at the ultimate truth, but rather, just nudge the encyclopedia one step closer to its goal. This “iterative attitude” is particularly well-suited to assembling human input. Humans often take a long time to make decisions, change their minds frequently, and are susceptible to persuasion by their peers.

What can Radicle, and other p2p & blockchain projects, learn from Wikipedia in this regard? Up to this point, many protocol designers in blockchain have had a preference for mechanisms that achieve “finality” — that is, resolve to a final state, with no further changes allowed — as quickly as possible. There are often very good reasons for this, particularly in the area of consensus mechanisms and yet, taking inspiration from Wikipedia, we might just as easily consider designs that favor slow incremental changes over fast decisive ones.

For instance, imagine a protocol in which (as with Wikipedia) it is relatively easy for any user to change the system state (e.g. propose a new trusted seed), but such a change might be equally easily reverted by another user, or a group of users with superior reputation.

Or consider a protocol in which any state change is rolled out over a long period of time. In Osrank, for instance, this might mean that trusted seeds would start out as only 10% trusted, then 20% trusted one month later, and so on. While such a design would be quite different from how Wikipedia works today, it would hew to the same spirit of slow, considered change over instant finality.

Attacks and defenses

While the previous section covered a number of ways in which Wikipedia’s mechanisms have found success up to this point, the true test of a decentralized system is how vulnerable it is to attacks and manipulation. In this section, we introduce Wikipedia’s perspective on security. We then examine some of Wikipedia’s vulnerabilities, the attacks that play upon them and the defenses the Wikipedia community has evolved.

How Wikipedia Works: Chapter 12 discusses the fact that nearly all of the security utilized by Wikipedia is “soft security”:

“One of the paradoxes of Wikipedia is that this system seems like it could never work. In a completely open system run by volunteers, why aren’t more limits required? One answer is that Wikipedia uses the principle of soft security in the broadest way. Security is guided by the community, rather than by restricting community actions ahead of time. Everyone active on the site is responsible for security and quality. You, your watchlist, and your alertness to strange actions and odd defects in articles are part of the security system.”

What does “soft security” mean? It means that security is largely reactionary, rather than preventative or broadly restrictive on user actions in advance. With a few exceptions, any anonymous editor can change any page on the site at any time. The dangers of such a policy are obvious, but the advantages are perhaps less so: Wikipedia’s security offers a level of adaptability and flexibility that is not possible with traditional security policies and tools.

Below, we discuss three kinds of attacks that Wikipedia has faced through the years: Bad Edits (vandalism and spam), Sybil Attacks, and Editing for Pay. For each attack we note the strategies and solutions Wikipedia has responded with and offer a rough evaluation of their efficacy.

Bad edits: Vandalism and spam

The fact that anyone with an internet connection can edit almost any page on Wikipedia is one of the site’s greatest strengths, but perhaps may also be its greatest vulnerability. Edits not in service of Wikipedia’s mission fall into two general categories: malicious edits (vandalism) and promotional edits (spam).

While Wikipedia reader/editors are ultimately responsible for the clarity and accuracy of the encylopedia’s content, a number of tools have been developed to combat vandalism and spam. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual gives a high-level overview:

• Bots. Much vandalism follows simple patterns that computer programs can recognize. Wikipedia allows bots to revert vandalism: in the cases where they make a mistake, the mistake is easy to revert.
• Recent changes patrol. The RCP is a semi-organized group of editors who monitor changes to all the articles in Wikipedia, as the changes happen, to spot and revert vandalism immediately. Most RC patrollers use tools to handle the routine steps in vandal fighting.
• Watchlists. Although the primary focus of monitoring is often content (and thus potential content disputes, as described in Chapter 10: Resolving content disputes), watchlists are an excellent way for concerned editors to spot vandalism.

Given the incredible popularity, and perceived respectability, of Wikipedia, it’s safe to say that the community’s defenses against basic vandalism and spam are holding up quite well overall.

Sybil attacks

Sybil attacks, endemic to the blockchain ecosystem, are known as “Sockpuppets” in Wikipedia, and are used to designate multiple handles controlled by the same person. They are usually employed when one person wants to seem like multiple editors, or wants to continue editing after being blocked.

While Sockpuppets are harder to detect in an automated fashion than vandalism and spam, there is a process for opening Sockpuppet investigations and a noticeboard for ongoing investigations. Well-thought-out sockpuppetry attacks are both time-consuming to mount and defend against. While dedicated investigators (known as clerks) are well-suited to the task, it is impossible to know how much successful Sockpuppetry has yet to be discovered.

Hired guns — Editing for pay

Hired guns — editors who make changes to in exchange for pay — are becoming an increasingly serious concern for Wikipedia, at least according to a 2018 Medium post, “Wikipedia’s Top-Secret ‘Hired Guns’ Will Make You Matter (For a Price)”, in which Author Stephen Harrison writes,

“A market of pay-to-play services has emerged, where customers with the right background can drop serious money to hire editors to create pages about them; a serious ethical breach that could get worse with the rise of—wait for it—cryptocurrency payments.”

In the post, Harrison draws on a number of interviews he conducted with entrepreneurs running businesses in this controversial space. According to Harrison, businesses like What About Wiki, operate in secret, utilizing large numbers of sockpuppet accounts and do not disclose the fact that that their edits are being done in exchange for pay.

In the past, Wikipedia has prohibited all such activities and in fact, businesses like What About Wiki violate Wikipedia’s Terms of Use — a legally binding agreement. However that seems to be changing. According to Harrison,

“A 2012 investigation discovered that the public relations firm Wiki-PR was editing the encyclopedia using multiple deceptive sock-puppet accounts for clients like Priceline and Viacom. In the wake of the Wiki-PR incident, the Wikimedia Foundation changed its terms of use in 2014 to require anyone compensated for their contributions to openly disclose their affiliation.”

The upshot is that since 2014, paid editing is now allowed on the site so long as the relationship is disclosed.

And yet, major questions remain. For one thing, at least according to Harrison’s analysis, companies acting in compliance with Wikipedia’s disclosure policy represent just a small fraction of the paid editors working (illegitimately) on the site. For another, he argues that complying with Wikipedia’s policies leads to paid editors making less money, because there’s a lower chance their edits will be accepted and therefore less chance the clients will be willing to foot the bill.

This leads to a final question, which is whether paid edits can ever really be aligned with the deep values that Wikipedia holds. For instance, one of Wikipedia’s main behavior guidelines is a prohibition against editors who have a conflict of interest in working on a given page. It’s hard to imagine a clearler conflict of interest than a paid financial relationship between the editor and the subject of a page.

DAOs

Wikipedia’s success is inspirational in terms of what can be accomplished through decentralized coordination of a large group of people. While we believe that the decentralized web still has many lessons to learn from the success of Wikipedia — and we’ve tried to touch a few in this post — a great deal of work and thinking has already been done around how a large organization like Wikipedia could eventually be coordinated on-chain.

Such organizations are known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and that will be the topic of a future post.

Photo by designwebjae (Pixabay)

The post What the decentralized web can learn from Wikipedia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Written by Dana Brown, Director, The Next System Project. Article reposted from The Next System Project

They are our collective heritage as a species—both those resources which we inherit from previous generations and those which we create—managed in such a way as to preserve shared values and community identity. The commons are the collective resources themselves, and the practice of collective economic production and social cooperation used to steward those resources—as well as the values of equity and fairness that underpin them—is often referred to as commoning. Many resources can be managed as commons (though often there are attempts to privatize or “enclose” many of those same resources). These can include knowledge, urban space, land, blood banks, seed banks, the internet, open source software and much more.

Potential Impact

The commons are pervasive and as such, often go unnoticed. However, their thriving existence alongside forms of private and public ownership provides a framework for understanding and creating social value beyond the confines of conventional economics.

The rich traditions and successes of commoning provide models for how to push back against privatization and enclosure, ensuring common resources are protected for future generations. Meanwhile, political economist Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work has disproved the enduring “tragedy of the commons” hypothesis that collectively managed natural resources would necessarily be overexploited and destroyed over the long term.

Taxing the private use of common resources, combined with
redistribution or other efforts to formalize “commons trusts” to ensure their sustainable stewardship, could help stem the tide of privatization and extraction. The tax proceeds could be used as a form of reparation to communities that have traditionally borne the brunt of extraction of their common resources, and to restore those resources when depleted.

Transformative Characteristics

Commoning is a generative and “value-making” process that can decommodify land and other resources, and demonstrate that communities can manage them effectively without private control or state governance. It asserts a different “universe of value” and worldview from capitalism and unfettered consumerism, and helps communities break free from the scarcity mindset of capital. “The commons does not compete on p rice or quality, but on cooperation,” says commons activist and author David Bollier. It “‘out-cooperates’ the market … by itself eliciting personal commitment and creativity and encouraging collective responsibility and sustainable practices.”

The commons, and related peer-to-peer production models, offer concrete, replicable, and dynamic frameworks for sustainably managing existing resources and creating new ones. They also offer a model for deciding what not to produce in order to most effectively protect our global common resources.

Examples

WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia is a form of online knowledge commons, “a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of openly editable content.” It contains more than 5 million encyclopedia entries (a shared resource), created and edited by its authors and editors (a community) with a set of community-determined content and editing guidelines (rules). Wikipedia displaced once-expensive bound encyclopedias to become one of the world’s largest reference websites, attracting hundreds of millions of unique users per month and engaging over 140,000 active users—a group that anyone with an internet connection can join—in creating and editing content in almost 300 languages.

EL PARQUE DE LA PAPA

Peru’s “potato park” is a community-led conservation project that preserves traditional customs and indigenous rights to the “living library” of genetic information contained in the over 900 varieties of potato found in the Inca Valley region. The native Quechua peoples bred and cultivated these potato varieties for centuries, but biotech and agricultural corporations moved to appropriate the genetic information in the seeds and take commercial control without the consent of the Quechua people. They then forced the Quechua to pay for the seeds their ancestors had worked so hard to breed and protect. Indigenous representatives organized and successfully negotiated the repatriation of the potato varieties and the rights to conserve them in a 32,000-acre potato park. More than 8,000 community members now collectively manage the park  to “promote the cultivation, use and maintenance of diversity of traditional agricultural resources” and to ensure their traditional agricultural resources do not become subject to private intellectual property rights.

Challenges

Most people are not aware of the pervasiveness and enduring nature of the commons and don’t understand commoning as a viable alternative to consumption-driven and competitive economics. The increasing enclosure and privatization of the commons is erasing our collective memory of many enduring commoning practices. For example, control of the majority of the global seed market (a resource once managed as a commons in many communities) is now concentrated in a handful of multinational corporations. Furthermore, scarcity of some common resources may intensify competition for control in the coming years, while others lack adequate infrastructure support and are therefore vulnerable to privatization.  

More Resources

• The Commons Transition Primer:  https://primer.commonstransition.org

• News, analysis and resources on the commons: www.bollier.org

The post The commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Internet didn’t quite deliver on its original promise and today we’re talking with people who are fixing it.”

We’re very glad that Andrey Salomatin, creator of Code podcast (see original post here), got in touch to let us know about this recent podcast on what’s happening lately in P2P decentralized web development. If you’re interested in the history Scuttlebutt (a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform) and how it works; or you want an introduction to the Dat project (a nonprofit-backed data sharing protocol for applications of the future); and a “vision for the decentralized future”, Andrey and his five guests share their experiences and reflections. This is certainly more technical than most of the material we share on the P2PF blog, but there is plenty of food for thought here for anyone interested in the future of the decentralized web.

Andrey Salomatin: Slack servers are down and work stops. Facebook sells users’ personal data to third-parties with no negative consequences to the company. Turkey successfully blocks citizens’ access to Wikipedia. Those are all results of peoples’ decisions of course, but there’s also something else at play. Our mainstream technology stack makes execution on all of those decisions ridiculously easy.

The Internet didn’t quite deliver on its original promise and today we’re talking with people who are fixing it.

Guests

• Jon-Kyle Mohr
• Zenna Fiscella
• Mathias Buus
• Christian Couder
• Mikey

Outline

• 00:07 Introducing the topic
• 01:57 Limitations of centralized systems
• 04:57 Introducing Jon-Kyle
• 05:57 Introducing Zenna
• 08:23 Introducing Mathias
• 11:20 BitTorrent and scale
• 14:19 Multiple versions of the truth, version control systems (Jon-Kyle)
• 19:16 Introducing Christian
• 20:08 Git internal structure
• 22:03 Benefits of Git architecture
• 27:03 Why is Git not decentralized
• 32:23 How Dat started, tech description of the protocol (back to Mathias)
• 45:28 Dat usecases (Mathias and Jon-Kyle)
• 51:42 Future of Dat (Mathias)
• 53:54 Introducing Mikey
• 55:07 History of Scuttlebutt
• 56:22 How Scuttlebutt works
• 65:30 Usecases for Scuttlebutt
• 69:29 Vision for the decentralized future (Zenna)
• 71:39 Final thoughts on the topic, summary, thanks

Find us in P2P networks

• This episode in Dat:
  dat://084e8ceae2fd1012e5368a70908acdb7aa92c3f5de0c62d14ef5beacbf19295d
• This episode in IPFS:
  QmVVjxxitJrhNoRkTe3nJ2SztWMx9tYnpURuAVAY3Dx75y
  cheat through a https gateway
• Andrey in Scuttlebutt:
  @RP01FOdcs/QABLmMxTGe1U9myUfSLN/5ItlXQcp7oWQ=.ed25519
• Zenna in Scuttlebutt:
  @3ZeNUiYQZisGC6PLf3R+u2s5avtxLsXC66xuK41e6Zk=.ed25519
• Mikey in Scuttlebutt:
  @6ilZq3kN0F+dXFHAPjAwMm87JEb/VdB+LC9eIMW3sa0=.ed25519

Links

• All things Decentralization / Open Source / Fabrication from Zenna
• Website peer-to-peer-web.com
• Article Achieving Scale in the Decentralized Web by Paul Frazee from Beaker Browser
• IPFS

Links: Git

• Git
• Git LFS
• Video of the talk “Git From the Bits Up” by Tim Berglund

Links: Dat & Beaker

• Dat Project
• Beaker Browser
• Enoki
• peer-to-peer-web.com

Links: Scuttlebutt

• Scuttlebutt.nz
• Scuttlebutt grants process
• Collection of articles Scuttlebutt stories

Episode was produced by Andrey Salomatin.

Music by Mid-Air!

Code Podcast is about ideas that shape the way we build software. It’s like Planet Money for developers.

Each episode we interview people with different views on a single topic. We break down complex ideas to present why and how they are used to build modern software.

Photo by duiceburger

The post Code Podcast: P2P, People to People appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Last week, Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published a rather surprising article on the Wired site entitled: “Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia”. The starting point of her reasoning was to point out that Wikipedia content is increasingly being used by digital giants, such as Facebook or Google:

You may not realise how ubiquitous Wikipedia is in your everyday life, but its open, collaboratively-curated data is used across semantic, search and structured data platforms  on the web. Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home source Wikipedia articles for general knowledge questions; Google’s knowledge panel features Wikipedia content for snippets and essential facts; Quora contributes to and utilises the Wikidata open data project to connect topics and improve user recommendations.

More recently, YouTube and Facebook have turned to Wikipedia for a new reason: to address their issues around fake news and conspiracy theories. YouTube said that they would begin linking to Wikipedia articles from conspiracy videos, in order to give users additional – often corrective – information about the topic of the video. And Facebook rolled out a feature using Wikipedia’s content to give users more information about the publication source of articles appearing in their feeds.

With Wikipedia being solicited more and more by these big players, Katherine Maher believes that they should contribute in return to help the project to guarantee its sustainability:

But this work isn’t free. If Wikipedia is being asked to help hold back the ugliest parts of the internet, from conspiracy theories to propaganda, then the commons needs sustained, long-term support – and that support should come from those with the biggest monetary stake in the health of our shared digital networks.

The companies which rely on the standards we develop, the libraries we maintain, and the knowledge we curate should invest back. And they should do so with significant, long-term commitments that are commensurate with our value we create. After all, it’s good business: the long-term stability of the commons means we’ll be around for continued use for many years to come.

As the non-profits that make the internet possible, we already know how to advocate for our values. We shouldn’t be afraid to stand up for our value.

An image that makes fun of a famous quote by Bill Gates who had described the Linux project as “communist”. But today, it is Capital that produces or recovers digital Commons – starting with Linux – and maybe that shouldn’t make us laugh..

Digital commons: the problem of sustainability

There is something strange about the director of the Wikimedia Foundation saying this kind of thing. Wikipedia is in fact a project anchored in the philosophy of Free Software and placed under a license (CC-BY-SA) that allows commercial reuse, without discriminating between small and large players. The “SA”, for Share Alike, implies that derivative works made from Wikipedia content are licensed under the same license, but does not prohibit commercial reuse. For Wikidata data, things go even further since this project is licensed under CC0 and does not impose any conditions on reuse, not even mentioning the source.

So, if we stick strictly to the legal plan, players like Facebook or Google are entitled to draw from the content and data of Wikimedia projects to reuse them for their own purposes, without having to contribute financially in return. If they do, it can only be on a purely voluntary basis and that is the only thing Katherine Maher can hope for with her platform: that these companies become patrons by donating money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Google has already done so in the past, with a donation of $2 million in 2010 and another $1 million last year. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google have also put in place a policy whereby these companies pledge to pay the Wikimedia Foundation the same amount as their individual employees donate.

Should digital giants do more and significantly address the long-term sustainability of the Digital Commons that Wikipedia represents? This question refers to reciprocity for the Commons, which is both absolutely essential and very ambivalent. If we broaden the perspective to free software, it is clear that these Commons have become an essential infrastructure without which the Internet could no longer function today (90% of the world’s servers run on Linux, 25% of websites use WordPress, etc.) But many of these projects suffer from maintenance and financing problems, because their development depends on communities whose means are unrelated to the size of the resources they make available to the whole world. This is shown very well in the book, “What are our digital infrastructures based on? The invisible work of web makers”, by Nadia Eghbal:

Today, almost all commonly used software depends on open source code, created and maintained by communities of developers and other talents. This code can be taken up, modified and used by anyone, company or individual, to create their own software. Shared, this code thus constitutes the digital infrastructure of today’s society…whose foundations threaten, however, to yield under demand!

Indeed, in a world governed by technology, whether Fortune 500 companies, governments, large software companies or startups, we are increasing the burden on those who produce and maintain this shared infrastructure. However, as these communities are quite discreet, it has taken a long time for users to become aware of this.

Like physical infrastructure, however, digital infrastructure requires regular maintenance and servicing. Faced with unprecedented demand, if we do not support this infrastructure, the consequences will be many.

This situation corresponds to a form of tragedy of the Commons, but of a different nature from that which can strike material resources. Indeed, intangible resources, such as software or data, cannot by definition be over-exploited and they even increase in value as they are used more and more. But tragedy can strike the communities that participate in the development and maintenance of these digital commons. When the core of individual contributors shrinks and their strengths are exhausted, information resources lose quality and can eventually wither away.

The progression of the “Capital Commons”

Market players are well aware of this problem, and when their activity depends on a Digital Commons, they usually end up contributing to its maintenance in return. The best known example of this is Linux software, often correctly cited as one of the most beautiful achievements of FOSS. As the cornerstone of the digital environment, the Linux operating system was eventually integrated into the strategies of large companies such as IBM, Samsung, Intel, RedHat, Oracle and many others (including today Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook). Originally developed as a community project based on contributions from volunteer developers, Linux has profoundly changed in nature over time. Today, more than 90% of the contributions to the software are made by professional developers, paid by companies. The Tragedy of the Commons “by exhaustion” that threatens many Open Source projects has therefore been averted with regard to Linux, but only by “re-internalizing” contributors in the form of employees (a movement that is symmetrically opposite to that of uberization).

Main contributors to Linux in 2017. Individual volunteer contributors (none) now represent only 7.7% of project participants…

However, this situation is sometimes denounced as a degeneration of contributing projects that, over time, would become “Commons of capital” or “pseudo-Commons of capital”. For example, as Christian Laval explained in a forum:

Large companies create communities of users or consumers to obtain opinions, opinions, suggestions and technical improvements. This is what we call the “pseudo-commons of capital”. Capital is capable of organizing forms of cooperation and sharing for its benefit. In a way, this is indirect and paradoxical proof of the fertility of the common, of its creative and productive capacity. It is a bit the same thing that allowed industrial take-off in the 19th century, when capitalism organised workers’ cooperation in factories and exploited it to its advantage.

If this criticism can quite legitimately be addressed to actors like Uber or AirBnB who divert and capture collaborative dynamics for their own interests, it is more difficult to formulate against a project like Linux. Because large companies that contribute to software development via their employees have not changed the license (GNU-GPL) under which the resource is placed, they can never claim exclusivity. This would call into question the shared usage rights allowing any actor, commercial or not, to use Linux. Thus, there is literally no appropriation of the Common or return to enclosure, even if the use of the software by these companies participates in the accumulation of Capital.

On the other hand, it is obvious that a project which depends more than 90% on the contributions of salaried developers working for large companies is no longer “self-governed” as understood in Commons theory. Admittedly, project governance always formally belongs to the community of developers relying on the Linux Foundation, but you can imagine that the weight of the corporations’ interests must be felt, if only through the ties of subordination weighing on salaried developers. This structural state of economic dependence on these firms does make Linux a “common capital”, although not completely captured and retaining a certain relative autonomy.

How to guarantee the independence of digital Commons?

For a project like Wikipedia, things would probably be different if firms like Google or Facebook answered the call launched by Katherine Maher. The Wikipedia community has strict rules in place regarding paid contributions, which means that you would probably never see 90% of the content produced by employees. Company contributions would likely be in the form of cash payments to the Wikimedia Foundation. However, economic dependence would be no less strong; until now, Wikipedia has ensured its independence basically by relying on individual donations to cover the costs associated with maintaining the project’s infrastructure. This economic dependence would no doubt quickly become a political dependence – which, by the way, the Wikimedia Foundation has already been criticised for, regarding a large number of personalities with direct or indirect links with Google included on its board, to the point of generating strong tensions with the community. The Mozilla Foundation, behind the Firefox browser, has sometimes received similar criticism. Their dependence on Google funding may have attracted rather virulent reproach and doubts about some of its strategic choices.

In the end, this question of the digital Commons’ state of economic dependence is relatively widespread. There are, in reality, very few free projects having reached a significant scale that have not become more or less “Capital Commons”. This progressive satellite-isation is likely to be further exacerbated by the fact that free software communities have placed themselves in a fragile situation by coordinating with infrastructures that can easily be captured by Capital. This is precisely what just happened with Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub. Some may have welcomed the fact that this acquisition reflected a real evolution of Microsoft’s strategy towards Open Source, even that it could be a sign that “free software has won”, as we sometimes hear.

Microsoft was already the firm that devotes the most salaried jobs to Open Source software development (ahead of Facebook…)

But, we can seriously doubt it. Although free software has acquired an infrastructural dimension today – to the point that even a landmark player in proprietary software like Microsoft can no longer ignore it – the developer communities still lack the means of their independence, whether individually (developers employed by large companies are in the majority) or collectively (a lot of free software depends on centralized platforms like GitHub for development). Paradoxically, Microsoft has taken seriously Platform Cooperativism’s watchwords, which emphasize the importance of becoming the owner of the means of production in the digital environment in order to be able to create real alternatives. Over time, Microsoft has become one of the main users of GitHub for developing its own code; logically, it bought the platform to become its master. Meanwhile – and this is something of a grating irony – Trebor Scholz – one of the initiators, along with Nathan Schneider, of the Platform Cooperativism movement – has accepted one million dollars in funding from Google to develop his projects. This amounts to immediately making oneself dependent on one of the main actors of surveillance capitalism, seriously compromising any hope of building real alternatives.

One may wonder if Microsoft has not better understood the principles of Platform Cooperativism than Trebor Scholtz himself, who is its creator!

For now, Wikipedia’s infrastructure is solidly resilient, because the Wikimedia Foundation only manages the servers that host the collaborative encyclopedia’s contents. They have no title to them, because of the free license under which they are placed. GitHub could be bought because it was a classic commercial enterprise, whereas the Wikimedia Foundation would not be able to resell itself, even if players like Google or Apple made an offer. The fact remains that Katherine Maher’s appeal for Google or Facebook funding risks weakening Wikipedia more than anything else, and I find it difficult to see something positive for the Commons. In a way, I would even say that this kind of discourse contributes to the gradual dilution of the notion of Commons that we sometimes see today. We saw it recently with the “Tech For Good” summit organized in Paris by Emmanuel Macron, where actors like Facebook and Uber were invited to discuss their contribution “to the common good”. In the end, this approach is not so different from Katherine Maher’s, who asks that Facebook or Google participate in financing the Wikipedia project, while in no way being able to impose it on them. In both cases, what is very disturbing is that we are regressing to the era of industrial paternalism, as it was at the end of the 19th century, when the big capitalists launched “good works” on a purely voluntary basis to compensate for the human and social damage caused by an unbridled market economy through philanthropy.

Making it possible to impose reciprocity for the Commons on Capital

The Commons are doomed to become nothing more than “Commons of Capital” if they do not give themselves the means to reproduce autonomously without depending on the calculated generosity of large companies who will always find a way to instrumentalize and void them of their capacity to constitute a real alternative. An association like Framasoft has clearly understood that after its program “Dégooglisons Internet”, aimed at creating tools to enable Internet users to break their dependence on GAFAMs, has continued with the Contributopia campaign. This aims to raise public awareness of the need to create a contribution ecosystem that guarantees conditions of long-term sustainability for both individual contributors and collective projects. This is visible now, for example, with the participatory fundraising campaign organized to boost the development of PeerTube, a software allowing the implementation of a distributed architecture for video distribution that could eventually constitute a credible alternative to YouTube.

But with all due respect to Framasoft, it seems to me that the classic “libriste” (free culture activist) approach remains mired in serious contradictions, of which Katherine Maher’s article is also a manifestation. How can we launch a programme such as “Internet Negotiations” that thrashes the model of Surveillance Capitalism, and at the same time continue to defend licences that do not discriminate according to the nature of the actors who reuse resources developed by communities as common goods? There is a schizophrenia here due to a certain form of blindness that has always marked the philosophy of the Libre regarding its apprehension of economic issues. This in turn explains Katherine Maher’s – partly understandable – uneasiness at seeing Wikipedia’s content and data reused by players like Facebook or Google who are at the origin of the centralization and commodification of the Internet.

To escape these increasingly problematic contradictions, we must give ourselves the means to defend the digital Commons sphere on a firmer basis than free licenses allow today. This is what actors who promote “enhanced reciprocity licensing” are trying to achieve, which would prohibit lucrative commercial entities from reusing common resources, or impose funding on them in return. We see this type of proposal in a project like CoopCycle for example, an alternative to Deliveroo; or Uber Eats, which refuses to allow its software to be reused by commercial entities that do not respect the social values it stands for. The aim of this new approach, defended in particular by Michel Bauwens, is to protect an “Economy of the Commons” by enabling it to defend its economic independence and prevent it from gradually being colonised and recovered into “Commons of Capital”.

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With a project like CHATONS, an actor like Framasoft is no longer so far from embracing such an approach, because to develop its network of alternative hosts, a charter has been drawn up including conditions relating to the social purpose of the companies participating in the operation. It is a first step in the reconciliation between the Free and the SSE, also taking shape through a project like “Plateformes en Communs”, aiming to create a coalition of actors that recognize themselves in both Platform Cooperativism and the Commons. There has to be a way to make these reconciliations stronger, and lead to a clarification of the contradictions still affecting Free Software.

Make no mistake: I am not saying that players like Facebook or Google should not pay to participate in the development of free projects. But unlike Katherine Maher, I think that this should not be done on a voluntary basis, because these donations will only reinforce the power of the large centralized platforms by hastening the transformation of the digital Commons into “Capital Commons”. If Google and Facebook are to pay, they must be obliged to do so, just as industrial capitalists have come to be obliged to contribute to the financing of the social state through compulsory contributions. This model must be reinvented today, and we could imagine states – or better still the European Union – subjecting major platforms to taxation in order to finance a social right to the contribution open to individuals. It would be a step towards this “society of contribution” Framasoft calls for, by giving itself the means to create one beyond surveillance capitalism, which otherwise knows full well how to submit the Commons to its own logic and neutralize their emancipatory potential.

Photo by Elf-8

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Cory Doctorow: The pending update to the EU Copyright Directive is coming up for a committee vote on June 20 or 21 and a parliamentary vote either in early July or late September. While the directive fixes some longstanding problems with EU rules, it creates much, much larger ones: problems so big that they threaten to wreck the Internet itself.

Photo by ccPixs.com

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Ruby Irene Pratka: Call it “An Inconvenient Truth” for the market economy. In “The Third Industrial Revolution,” American economic and social theorist, business school professor, and policy adviser Jeremy Rifkin lays out a bleak vision of a near-future world devastated by climate change, mass extinctions, slow economic growth, and rising levels of extremism and inequality. “This is no longer imminent; it’s at the door and in the house,” Rifkin says, giving a lecture to an audience of several dozen people at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn, New York, before launching into a Q&A session. “If it were fully explained, our human family would be terrified.”

Over the course of the filmed lecture, Rifkin charts a course out of the quagmire. For Rifkin, creating a more sustainable world within the next two generations is necessary for humankind’s continued survival. This sustainable world, he says, will depend on increasing interconnectedness between people, places, and objects. Youth engagement, the Internet of things, renewable energy, and the sharing economy will play pivotal roles. Together, they will create a network of data hubs in buildings and vehicles, powered by renewable energy, generating data that can be mined by app developers to create useful, shared tools. The end result, Rifkin says, will be a “distributed nervous system that will allow everyone on the planet at low cost to engage directly with each other.”

This model “works best when it’s collaborative and open, and more and more people join the network and contribute our talent,” he says, referring to already-existing examples of open-source knowledge-sharing networks, such as Wikipedia and Massive Open Online Courses. Widening the network would open the door for a “vast, vast expansion of social entrepreneurialism,” he says. “You already spend part of your day in the market economy, and part of it in the sharing economy with car sharing and Wikipedia.” The sharing economy, he says, “as murky as it is now, is the first real new economic system since capitalism and socialism… I don’t think capitalism will disappear, but it will find value by developing a relationship with the sharing economy.”

He posits that the shift in perspective created by the sharing economy — from a focus on owning property to a focus on accessing goods, services, and experiences — will lead to a renewed awareness of the interconnectedness of everything on Earth, and a more sustained response to the troubles the planet is facing.

“We have one generation to lay down biosphere consciousness,” Rifkin says. “No other generation has had this weight, one generation called upon to save the species. We need to join together in the virtual and physical world to make this happen.”

Fittingly, the feature-length documentary itself, distributed by Vice Media, has been made available for free on YouTube. Watch it here.

Header image is a screenshot from the film

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Bart Grugeon Plana: After the breakthrough of the internet, Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard University, quickly understood that new online forms of collaboration such as Wikipedia or Linux responded to a completely new economic logic. Specializing in the digital culture of the networked society, Benkler worked on a coherent economic vision that guides us beyond the old opposition between state and markets.

According to Benkler, we may be at the beginning of a global cultural revolution that can bring about massive disruption. “Private property, patents and the free market are not the only ways to organize a society efficiently, as the neoliberal ideology wants us to believe,” Benkler says. “The commons offers us the most coherent alternative today to the dead end of the last 40 years of neoliberalism.”

Bart Grugeon Plana: In the political debate today, it seems that world leaders fall back to an old discussion whether it is the free market with its invisible hand that organizes the economy best or the state with its cumbersome administration. You urge to step beyond this old paradigm.

Yochai Benkler, law professor at Harvard University: Both sides in this discussion start from an assumption that is generally accepted but fundamentally wrong, namely that people are rational beings who pursue their own interests. Our entire economic model is based on this outdated view on humanity that goes back to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, philosophers from the 17th and 18th centuries. My position is that we have to review our entire economic system from top to bottom and rewrite it according to new rules. Research of the past decades in social sciences, biology, anthropology, genetics, and psychology shows that people tend to collaborate much more than we have assumed for a long time. So it comes down to designing systems that bring out these human values.

Many existing social and economic systems — hierarchical company structures, but also many educational systems and legal systems — start from this very negative image of man. To motivate people, they use mechanisms of control, by incorporating incentives that punish or reward. However, people feel much more motivated when they live in a system based on compromise, with a clear communication culture and where people work towards shared objectives. In other words, organizations that know how to stimulate our feelings of generosity and cooperation, are much more efficient than organizations that assume that we are only driven by self-interest.

This can work within a company or an organization, but how can you apply that to the macro economy?

Over the past decade, the internet has seen new forms of creative production that hasn’t been driven by a market nor organized by the state. Open-source software such as Linux, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the Creative Commons licenses, various social media, and numerous online forms of cooperation have created a new culture of cooperation that ten years ago would have been considered impossible by most. They are not a marginal phenomenon, but they are the avant-garde of new social and economic tendencies. It is a new form of production that is not based on private property and patents, but on loose and voluntary cooperation between individuals who are connected worldwide. It is a form of the commons adapted to the 21st century — it is the digital commons.

What is so revolutionary about it?

Just take the example of the Creative Commons license: It is a license that allows knowledge and information to be shared under certain conditions without the author having to be paid for it. It is a very flexible system that considers knowledge as a commons, that others can use and build on. This is a fundamentally different approach than the philosophy behind private copyrights. It proves that collective management of knowledge and information is not only possible, but that it is also more efficient and leads to much more creativity than when it is “locked up” in private licenses.

In the discussion whether the economy should be organized by the state or by the markets, certainly after the fall of communism, there was a widespread belief that models starting from a collective organization necessarily led to inefficiency and tragedy, because everyone would just save their own skin. This analysis has been the responsibility for the deregulation and privatization of the economy since then, the consequences of which have been known since 2008.

The new culture of global cooperation opens up a whole new window of possibilities. The commons offer us today a coherent alternative to the neoliberal ideology, which proves to be a dead end. After all, how far can privatization go? Trump and Brexit prove where it leads to.

Image by Bart Grugeon Plana

The commons is a model for collective management, which is mainly associated with natural resources. How can this be applied to the extremely complex modern economy?

The commons are centuries old, but as an intellectual tradition it was mainly substantiated and deepened by Elinor Östrom, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Over the past decades the commons have gained a new dimension through the movement of open source software and the whole culture of the Digital Commons. Östrom demonstrated on the basis of hundreds of studies that citizens can come together to manage their infrastructures and resources, often in agreement with the government, in a way that is both sustainable ecologically and economically. Commons are capable of integrating the diversity, knowledge, and wealth of the local community into the decision-making processes. They take into account the complexity of human motivations and commitments, while market logic reduces everything to a price, and is insensitive to values, or to motivations that are not inspired by profit. Östrom showed that the commons management model is superior in terms of efficiency and sustainability to models that fall back on a strong government — read: socialism or communism, or on markets and their price mechanism.

Examples of commons in the modern economy include the management model of the Wi-Fi spectrum, for example, in addition to the previously mentioned digital commons. Unlike the FM-AM radio frequencies that require user licenses, everyone is free to use the Wi-Fi spectrum, respecting certain rules, and place a router anywhere. This openness and flexibility is unusual in the telecommunications sector. It has made Wi-Fi an indispensable technology in the most advanced sectors of the economy, such as hospitals, logistics centers, or smart electricity grids.

In the academic, cultural, musical, and information world knowledge or information is increasingly treated as a commons, and freely shared. Musicians no longer derive their income from the copyright of music, but from concerts. Academic and non-fiction authors publish their works more often under Creative Commons licenses because they earn their living by teaching, consultancy, or through research funds. A similar shift also takes place in journalism.

An essential feature of the commons management model is that all members of the “common” have access to the “use” of goods or services, and that it is jointly agreed how access to those goods and services is organized. Market logic has a completely different starting point. Does this mean that markets and commons are not compatible?

Commons are the basis of every economic system. Without open access to knowledge and information, to roads, to public spaces in the cities, to public services and to communication, a society can not be organized. The markets also depend on open access to the commons to be able to exist, even though they try again and again to privatize the commons. There is a fundamental misconception about the commons. It is the essential building block of every open society. But commons and markets can coexist.

If today it is mainstream to think that a company should maximize its financial returns in order to maximize it shareholder value, it isn’t a fact of nature, it’s a product of 40 years of neoliberal politics and law intended to serve a very narrow part of the society. Wikipedia shows that people have very diverse motivations to voluntarily contribute to this global common good that creates value for the entire world community. The examples of the digital commons can inspire to set up similar projects in real economy, as happens with various digital platforms in the emerging collaborative economy.

A society that puts the commons at the center, recognizing the importance of protecting them and contributing to them, allows different economic forms of organization to co-exist, both commons and market logic, private and public, profit-oriented and non-profit-making. In this mixture, it is possible that the economy as a whole is oriented towards being socially embedded, being about the people who generate the economic activities, and who can have very different motivations and commitments. The belief that the economy would be driven by an abstract ideal of profit-oriented markets is no more than a construction of neoliberal ideology.

You seem very optimistic about the future of the commons?

I was more optimistic ten years ago than I am today. The commons are so central to the organization of a diverse economy that they must be expanded and protected in as many sectors of the economy as possible. There are many inspiring examples of self-organization according to the commons model, but it is clear that their growth will not happen automatically. Political choices will have to be made to restructure the economy beyond market logic. Regulation is necessary, with a resolute attitude towards economic concentration, and with a supportive legislative framework for commons, cooperatives and various cooperation models.

At the same time, more people need to make money with business models that build on a commons logic. The movement around “platform cooperativism” is a very interesting evolution. It develops new models of cooperatives that operate through digital platforms and that work together in global networks. They offer a counterweight to the business models of digital platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, which apply the market logic to the digital economy.

This brings us to the complex debate about future of work.

In the context of increasing automation, there is a need for a broader discussion that can see “money” and “work” as separate from each other, because the motivations to “work” can be very diverse. A general basic income is an opportunity to build a more flexible system that makes these various motivations possible, but also a shorter working week is an option.

We are facing an enormous task and we do not have a detailed manual that shows us the way. However, the current economic crisis and the declining acceptance of austerity means that the circumstances are favorable to experiment with new forms of organization.

When Wikipedia began to grow, it was told that it “only works in practice, because in theory it’s a total mess.” I believe, however, that today we have a theoretical framework that allows us to build a better life together without subjecting ourselves to the same framework that gave us oligarchic capitalism. The commons is the only genuine alternative today that allows us to build a truly participatory economic production system. The commons can cause a global cultural revolution.

This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Photo by Ratchanee @ Gatoon

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Why systems are failing

What is visibly failing is management of large scale societies, management of us, by those who seldom fully understand our problems, management regimes too big to adapt as needed. It is not stated often enough that we live in a heavily managed society. Yet people instantly understand what is meant by this: they have experience of being managed. Sometimes we are managed well, sometimes badly, but at some point in a large system, the former state will always give way to the latter. Eventually a sense of lost control comes over us all. We must take back control, we feel. It is hard to know how, hard to know who to target, for no leaders or parties seem to return power to us.

Many see that capital has become a dominant force in these large systems, re-shaping our cities, our very lives, flinging aside humans as detritus of the development process. As a solution we are constantly offered better management. We can keep casting around for better managers, but as the ‘Accidental Anarchist’ Carne Ross has been arguing, we live in complex systems that cannot successfully be controlled from the top down. The point is not to simply be angry with the managers for doing the wrong things, or for being the wrong managers, or for not advantaging us rather than others in these huge dynamic networks around us. Intention anyway becomes lost in such large systems. It’s true that some managers do transfer wealth from poor to rich, and others attempt to do the opposite. But each of the managers fails at some point, often fatally undermining any good work they have done. Perhaps it’s time to start entertaining a new line of thought: perhaps we should stop asking to be managed.

Escaping management

This requires a deep shift in thinking and a new set of institutions. Almost all previous political claims, from both left and right, assumed that people must be managed. Elections every four or five years do not undo management: elections are a method by which we find the correct managers, not a form of self-rule. Those who think that a single decision every four or five years means we are in control are invited to reflect on the absurdity of the proposition: mere ownership of your house or car involves dozens, even hundreds of decisions in a year. How then can ownership of your government require fewer decisions?

Why have I begun talking about ownership? It isn’t the usual language of making democracies work, except in that vague and dishonest usage where we are encouraged to ‘feel ownership’ of decisions made by others. Socialism and communism did once talk about ownership, but created a dichotomy between private ownership and central state ownership. Neo-liberalism bought into the same dichotomy and propagandised private ownership, or sometimes mixed forms of the two in unwieldy pseudo-free markets. It feels like we have not had a thorough, open-minded discussion about ownership for a long time. Doing so might begin to reveal how new institutions can move us beyond the current system failures.

Ownership, stripped back to its real meaning, is about control, and control is what we lack. The point of owning something is that we can do as we wish with it. To be made to feel ownership is a con, but to have ownership is to have control. The logical conclusion is that we should have ownership of as much of the world we inhabit as possible, and since we do not inhabit the world alone, we must own together with others. Others have reached this conclusion before: digging at the practicalities of Lefebvre and Harvey’s ‘right to the city’, which sounds a little ambiguous in its meaning, it emerges as something like a ‘right to own the city’. We should have control, says Harvey, not just of public space, but of our housing, our energy sources, our data infrastructure, our food supplies and of course our workplaces.

A culture of owning together

This sounds difficult, and it is. Owning our world would share some of the problems of managing it: our world is so big, there is too much of it and too many of us. Yet what an ownership framework offers that management does not is that it works at multiple scales rather than being always top down and so concerned with controlling entire systems. Where an overview is required – owning our atmosphere for example – we can construct decision-making systems that allow all to take part, but where detail is required we can conceive of much more localised forms of ownership, in which those most affected have the most say. This leaves plenty of room too for those things we should own individually: those things that mostly effect ourselves can be ours entirely.

One starting point is to look at digital commons which have arisen out of both the collaboration that the internet enables and the almost zero marginal cost of replication online. What the genuine digital commons distribute is control; what they have in common is mechanisms in place to de-centre individual or corporate ownership. The Wikimedia foundation opens up editing control as well as literal ownership rights; that it does both is key to understanding why it works, and why we can justly talk of a Wikipedia community. This can offer us clues about how future institutions might look.

Another starting point is the very common-sense idea that if it affects your life, you should be able to have a say in it. This isn’t a particularly radical idea – even private ownership of property in our current capitalist system is compromised by the imposition of planning laws. ‘Compromise’ sounds like a bad word, but here it is a recognition that what people do to their properties has a public impact, so there should be some level of public control over this most private of ownership forms. Where the planning rules fall down in the UK, and in most countries, is that local authorities and the planning systems are astonishingly undemocratic. Yet the underlying principle is established: in this most capitalist of societies we already recognise that we need some sort of collective, democratic control of our environment, and that it can take mixed individual/democratic forms. Ownership and democracy are closely overlapping ideas. What owning together means is that we decide. What democracy means is that where we must make decisions together, there is a process in place for that to happen. A call to own everything is a call for a democratic society.

To address the complex ownership claims, we must develop ideas of blended ownership, different types of ownership, overlapping ownership rights for different scale collectivities, all imagined beyond the private-state dichotomy. The recent UK Labour Party-commissioned paper Alternative Models of Ownership proposed three forms of ownership: worker co-ops, municipal and community ownership, and forms of state ownership with increased democratic accountability, but the commons of old that are inspiring many to establish new commons today often had very complex ownership and usage structures that endured over centuries. We should aim to construct what we might call full spectrum ownership, that is to say, an infinite variety of ownership types and overlapping ownership forms designed to give us control over our own lives.

The link to new digital commons is not merely an inspirational one. Emerging technologies are making it easier for more people to be involved in discussion and decision-making. Taiwan and radical Spanish cities are currently experimenting with intense public participation in creating legislation, and it’s only a matter of time until other countries follow suit. The ability to rapidly process data may also turn out to be key to working out who should have a say in what, and keeping ownership clusters up to date, so that we know who is actually affected by a particular issue.

Towards owning everything

I will return to housing for a practical example of how the right to own the city (and everything else) could work. We could escape from the dichotomy of privately owned homes versus publicly owned homes, and instead establish systems in which the individual would have ownership rights, yet the surrounding community would also have rights, perhaps to regulate the re-sale price or rents, as though the entire city or country were a network of community land trusts. In order to prevent islands of privilege developing, regional and national ownership bodies would also exercise some rights within a neighbourhood. Again, this isn’t a million miles from how the planning system works now, but this would need deeply democratic bodies at every level, starting from the street or neighbourhood up, to regulate the system, rather than a central government prodding bureaucratic local authorities to try to get the results they want.

I’m under no illusions that creating a culture of owning together is an easy thing to do, for we must all learn how to work with each other, undoing what we have been taught at school and at work. This requires a shift not just in institutions but in our own thinking and acting. But think of the prize: to own together is to live together, to undo the atomised society that management has given us, to create a more caring and less isolating society. A more convivial world could be seen as a by-product of taking back control, but it could be seen as potentially the best outcome of a culture of owning together.

Such a culture is already beginning to form offline as well as online. Thankfully we embark on this vast project without having to start entirely from scratch. The world of cooperatives has always been the ideal training ground for those who want to run the world together. Co-ops’ radical potential is not that they eliminate the dominance of capital in themselves, but that they prepare us for a world that we control. They teach us what a liveable system might look like, tied together by ownership that relies on relationships.

Radical campaigners have also begun asserting a culture of owning together in campaigning work. I am involved with a new organising fighting for renters’ rights in London. What excites me is that we have begun to embed a culture of owning together in our campaigning in two different ways. Firstly we are ensuring that the planned renters union itself will be owned by those it aims to help. This will be guaranteed by a truly grassroots democratic structure to the union, meaning the members will be able to launch their own fights within a mutual support network. Secondly we are not shying away from the key issue of who controls property: renters, we assert, should have more control, landlords should have less. This amounts to a transfer of  ownership rights over the properties we inhabit. Thus a renters union owned by renters can be envisaged as a way to collectively achieve a re-distribution of control, a re-distribution of ownership rights.

In the same way we can try to weave owning-together into all our projects, from campaigns, to local economy work, to political party building. At the governmental level we have the example of a few radical cities, but progress towards a government we can call our own seems painfully slow. What would the world look like if we started acting as though we owned everything? What if we identified as owners-together in our workplaces, our tech projects, our food growing projects, our campaign platforms, and began to assert full spectrum ownership of our world? We could begin to challenge those who think they own everything now, and at the same time gain practice in working together. Intertwining a culture of owning together into our everyday work would mean we spend more time interacting with our neighbours, and with those who share our interests, more time learning to interact as equals rather than as bosses and subordinates. The journey towards a world we truly own is bound to be a long one, but we needn’t await arrival at the destination to begin living in a more controllable and more convivial world.

Photo by Deivuh

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Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens: I’d like to start with outlining the issue, the problem around the emergence of peer production within the current neoliberal capitalist form of society and economy that we have. We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right?

The situation is that we have created communities consisting of people who are sometimes paid, sometimes volunteers, and by using open licenses, we are actually creating commonses – think about Linux, Wikipedia, Arduino, those kinds of things. But what is the problem? The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital. So, there is an accumulation of the commons on the one side, we are effectively producing a commons, but we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction. We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere. The solution that I propose is related to the work of Dmytri Kleiner – Dmytri proposed some years ago to create a peer production license. I’ll give you my interpretation of it; you can only use our commons if you reciprocate to some degree. So, instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons. Imagine that you have a community of producers, and around that you have an entrepreneurial coalition of cooperative, ethical, social, solidarity enterprise.

The idea is that you would have an immaterial commons of codes and knowledge, but then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops. The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production. That’s the basic idea. I think that a number of things are happening around that, like solidarity co-ops, and other new forms of cooperative-ism.

The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups. They have been very influenced by this neoliberal atmosphere that has been dominant in their generation. They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take. Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money. They forbid you to continue to work in the same sector after your company has failed, and you have a gag order, so you don’t even have free speech to talk about your negative experience. This is a very common experience. Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system.

There is a real lack of knowledge within the young generation that there are other forms of enterprise possible. I think that the other way is also true. A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge. They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge. They’re also not aware that there’s a new way of becoming more competitive through increased cooperation of open knowledge commons. This is the human side of it, and we need to work on the knowledge and mutual experience of these two sectors. Both are growing at the same time; after the crisis of 2008, we’ve had an explosion of the sharing economy and the peer production economy on the one side, but also a revitalization of the cooperative sector.

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Kristine Wong: Almost everyone who searches for information has used Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with over 40 million articles (in roughly 300 languages) written and edited by volunteers around the globe. Yet despite the whopping amount of information Wikipedia contains, less than 20 percent of all Wikipedia contributors in 2015 were women, according to the Wikimedia Foundation.

But according to Isla Haddow-Flood and Florence Devouard, the gap is even greater when it comes to both contributors from Africa and Wikipedia articles about the people, history, culture, and ideas from the continent. “I was bothered that just a few years ago, there were no African contributors for Wikipedia,” said Devouard, who served on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. And information about African women (who are living in Africa) was especially lacking. “The content available on Africa was a gap, but the lack of it on women was an abyss,” said Haddow-Flood — chair and advancement lead of the nonprofit Wiki in Africa — who lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

So in 2016, the two launched Wiki Loves Women, a pilot project that worked in Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Ghana, and Nigeria to organize efforts among community members to contribute Wikipedia entries about African women. The Goethe Institut donated $120,000 euros to fund the pilot for 15 months (until March 2017), and donated meeting space and support in the four countries. We spoke to Haddow-Flood and Devouard to learn more about the project.

Kristine Wong: Tell me more about what motivated you to start Wiki Loves Women.

Haddow-Flood: The point was to celebrate women in Africa that people don’t know — and also to reflect the daily issues that women encounter. Something that is cultural, something that is political, or something that affects women around the world, for example.

Devouard: Wikipedia has a huge amount of data for the sciences and a lot of stuff related to movies, actors, and singers, but whole areas have basically next to nothing. And content related to notable African women and content related to what concerns African women is not available online in the first place. This means that even if I or others want to write about these topics I don’t have the sources to.

How did the project work on the ground?

Haddow-Flood: In the applications, we asked them to tell us how they wanted to work and motivate community members. In Cameroon, we have a single person who works on the project and in Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria it was Wikimedia chapter that worked on it as a group. In Ghana, a Wikimedia group was set up.

Once the team was sorted out in each country, we worked with them to isolate where they wanted to focus their time and energy. They thought about subjects and topics they wanted to cover and they approached various organizations. There were groups that had content — mainly civil society organizations — for example, someone who works with women in shantytowns. Cote d’Ivoire wanted to work with women in parliament. We also worked with partners such as a tech lab or a writers group or people who were interested in learning how to write on Wikipedia. There was a monthly stipend given to each of the groups. In some cases, it was a salary. In other cases, it was a way to support the group.

Devouard: We left them a lot of freedom. We are in touch with them by Skype and email, and we met a few times through the different Wikimedia events. The results of their efforts reflected their own personal interests. In Nigeria, we had a person with a lot of personality and someone who was focused on women’s rights, for example related to forced marriage or breast cancer. In Ghana, they had a small group that was very tech-aware and tech-oriented. So quite naturally they were focused more on tech training and on women leaders in technology. In Cameroon, there was a focus on sports and professional occupations. We wanted them to go in the direction where there was the least resistance.

Wikithon at the Goethe Insitute on June 26, 2016. Photo by Uwe Jung via Wikimedia Commons

What are some of the outcomes and results of the project?

Haddow-Flood: There’s been empowerment and confidence in the women who had already been part of the Wikimedia group. This project allowed them to have more of a standing in it. For example, in Cote d’Ivoire, one woman felt quite intimidated in the beginning and now she’s one of the leaders in the group. The same thing happened in Ghana as well, in that people who had come into the group as part of the project started to take on leadership.

And we were able to count that we started or expanded 1,510 articles on Wikipedia. This is not all just concentrated in those four countries. There was also an online contest we had. We started with a writing project and halfway through we were part of expanding stub articles and female articles all relating to women subjects. We also had a “translata-thon” as well where we chose the 16 important women from Africa and the ideal was to translate [the article] into 16 different languages. People from Texas and London and Helsinki and Armenia — they were with us in our mission and wanted to contribute to Wikipedia.

Devouard: It’s incredibly hard to totally measure the amount of content that was added to Wikipedia, because we can count photos but we can’t measure articles where content was added. It’s one of our challenges. Now they are tracking when content is added, but they didn’t before. And in our case the duration of time [the project was funded for 15 months] is not long enough.

What are the challenges that the project faced?

Haddow-Flood: The ongoing challenge we have is to make sure it continues – that’s a massive challenge. We need much more funding to carry on and expand it to other countries.

What lessons learned would you pass on to others who are interested in starting similar efforts?

Devouard: The important thing is to try not to reinvent the wheel and try to work with people who already have the information. What’s very important is to be respectful of the group and communities you’re working with, and trying not to impose your preconceived model on them. Provide as much support as they need. Be mindful of cultural dynamics and where they are at that time.

What do you consider to be success in this project?

Haddow-Flood: For us, it’s if in five years, 16 countries are self-sustained and continuing for the project for themselves. We needed the kind of interventions in the last 15 months to make that happen and to set people on the right track to make it happen and working towards that goal. The four countries that were funded for the pilot project are continuing on, but not with the same energy since the funding has ceased. But in no way do they want to stop doing this.

This Q&A has been edited for length. 

Header photo of the Wiki Loves Women meeting at the Goethe-Institut Accra in Jan. 2017, courtesy of Islahaddow (photo by Gereon K.) via Wikimedia Commons

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