to functional works such as databases and tangible output, such as open hardware and Internet infrastructure. Reflecting political debates and ideologies in the digital commons sphere, licensing options oscillate between public domain, copyleft, and the reservation or the control of commercial use and derivative rights.
10 User Motivations in Peer Production
Sebastian Spaeth & Sven Niederhöfer
Peer‐production systems often attract larger communities of paid and unpaid volunteers, who contribute to their respective projects. This chapter examines different underlying motivations that fuel these contributions. It thereby takes a tripartite form and summarizes current literature on (1) individual motivations to participate, (2) selection of tasks, and (3) participation in peer production as a social practice. In the first two parts, we draw on self‐determination theory, which discusses various intrinsic (the joy performing the task itself), extrinsic (rewards such as pay), and internalized extrinsic motives (internalized mores and values). The discussed literature shows that contributors are motivated not by a single motive, but by a whole range of interacting intrinsic, internalized extrinsic, and extrinsic motives with different magnitudes. It further shows that peers’ motivation partly determines the type of task they will self‐allocate, whereby (internalized) extrinsic motives seem to play a crucial role in impelling individuals to perform mundane tasks. In the third part, we view peer‐production systems as social practices, conceptualizing these systems as collectives of contributors with shared general principles, whose lives increasingly become intertwined with these communities. Reviewed literature suggests that motivation may be influenced by factors such as social exposure and institutional frameworks.
11 Governing for Growth in Scope: Cultivating a Comparative Understanding of How Peer‐Production Collectives Evolve
Rebecca Karp, Amisha Miller, & Siobhán O’Mahony
Scholars have been fascinated by the rise of peer‐production collectives and how governance mechanisms can foster or inhibit the growth of new contributors. Few scholars have attended to what explains changes in the scope of innovation activities peer‐production collectives assume. We identify five roles that peer collectives can play in the innovation lifecycle, from idea generation to post‐production review, and compare 12 mature peer collectives to understand how their scope evolved over time. Our provisionary comparative analysis suggests that peer collectives that expanded their scope were more likely to distribute governance rights to contributing participants through a more collaborative mode of production. We offer a framework for analyzing why peer collectives grow differently and articulate a research agenda that embraces a dynamic approach to examining how scope and governance evolves.
Part IV Cases: Realizing Peer Production
12 Free and Open Source Software
Stéphane Couture
Free and open source software (FOSS) was formally launched in the 1980s by Richard Stallman in opposition to proprietary or closed software. Its speed of development was boosted by the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, and Linux became the original example of crowd‐sourced “bazaar” production whereby the number of eyes “makes all bugs shallow.” This chapter presents the history of FOSS, its modes of production, and its impact on both the infrastructure of the network society and the culture and practices of peer production projects. It ends by addressing some of the challenges FOSS is facing, in particular in terms of developing sustainable models, enhancing diversity in participation, and negotiating its growing integration into market processes.
13 Wikipedia and Wikis
Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin
Wikis are often considered to be the core platform of peer production. This chapter brings together a broad range of research on wikis and Wikipedia from different disciplines. It delineates the central design principles and affordances of wikis and also pays attention to their historical development and embeddedness in society. Wikis are described as content management systems that allow for flexible collaboration without a defined content owner or leader. Users can modify the content and structure of documents directly in their web browser. Edits are usually archived and open to revision. This chapter pays particular attention to the most successful wiki‐based system, the non‐profit, online encyclopedia Wikipedia. As the chapter explains, Wikipedia actually contains a broad range of more or less individual wiki projects and has inspired a plethora of other endeavors, both open source and proprietary. The particular peer production model employed in Wikipedia is elucidated, and in the course also complicated, as is the role of Wikipedia in the contemporary commercial Internet. The chapter concludes by highlighting several tensions emerging from a wiki‐based peer‐production model, between amateurs and experts, human editors and bots, lay knowledge and academic knowledge, and the shaping of trust through external actors.
14 Participatory Cartography: Drones, Countermapping, and Technological Power
Adam Fish
An investigation into participatory cartography – amateur and collaborative mapmaking – exhibits how theories of peer production often neglect how collective collaboration is dependent upon the state and fuels corporate technological development. This chapter investigates four case studies of participatory cartography, using theories of new materialism and technological power to expose the links between volunteerism and capitalism. For example, the participatory mapping project OpenStreetMap and its links to technology companies such as Bytemark and CloudMade, the early days of the US drone hacker network transforming into the for‐profit companies 3DR and DJI, and the problems of inequality related to the Indonesian Dayak community countermapping projects offer vivid examples of how the autonomy of peer production can be limited by elite technological power. Also, the Global Positioning System, the most important technology for participatory mapping, is a highly costly platform financed by the state. The new materialistic approach taken in this chapter emphasizes the entanglements of technology, culture, and politics and the movement of power across these different domains. That peer production is dependent on extant forms of technological power does not extinguish its political potential. On the contrary, the materialism approach invites proponents of peer production to better respond to the inequities associated with elite domination of technological power.
15 P2P Learning
Panayotis Antoniadis & Alekos Pantazis
In this chapter we identify a wide variety of learning projects, platforms, tools, and methodologies which could be characterized as “peer‐to‐peer” and present their main characteristics along three core dimensions (curriculum selection, learning process, and knowledge abstraction). We then discuss how p2p learning processes can be encouraged, facilitated, and supported by digital and physical infrastructures, keeping a critical outlook on the often‐hidden power asymmetries that are always present at the infrastructure level. We pay particular attention to the case of small intentional groups of adult learners, and to four exemplary case studies – two digital platforms and two physical spaces – with similarities and differences, which help us to deconstruct and critically analyze the different dimensions of identified p2p learning.
16 Biohacking
Morgan Meyer
Over the past few years, a plethora of terms have emerged to describe scientific activities in the life sciences that
