peer‐production mechanisms have empowered movements to generate models of organizing for ensuing protests to appropriate. They have been used to create shared normative references and collective action frames, outreach to novel audiences, and mobilize other like‐minded individuals. This chapter investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer‐production reshuffles social change activism today and exploring the convergences and tensions between peer networks and social movements. First, the chapter traces the historical trajectory of peer production, linking distinct approaches to organizing to technological innovation. Second, it reflects on the social affordances of digital infrastructure and their role in fostering specific modes of creativity. Third, it explores three consequences of peer production for social movements: cultural production and norm change, collective identity, and the commons. It finally examines three tensions that might emerge while embedding peer‐production mechanisms and values in collective action: individual vs. collective engagements, peer networks vs. social movement organizations, and self‐organized vs. commercial infrastructure.
23 Feminist Peer Production
Sophie Toupin
Feminist(s) have not only criticized certain aspects of peer‐production practices, but have come to “do” feminist peer production. This chapter examines the feminist criticisms of peer production, which they argue has rendered invisible the analytical categories of gender and race. It then focuses on new practices that have emerged out of feminist peer‐production sensibilities, practices grounded in feminist objectivity and which reflect specific socio‐technical realities.
24 Postcolonial Peer Production
Maitrayee Deka
What are postcolonial peer‐production practices? This chapter aims to answer this question by examining the ways in which postcolonial peer production has emerged as a way to provincialize the dominant Euro‐American versions. The proposition that imagines the West as the unique origin of peer‐production practices is disrupted in this chapter, which traces the histories of peer production in postcolonial contexts and highlights their main characteristics. The main focus of the chapter is to centralize embodied knowledge systems and ad hoc techno‐social assemblages that form a large part of creative and productive practices in the Global South. By highlighting popular bases of knowledge creation, one diverts attention from the dominant Euro‐American peer communities in their reliance on creative figures onto a more chaotic universe of creative practices.
25 Gaps in Peer Design
Francesca Musiani
From a technical standpoint, systems based on peer design are often deemed to be superior to proprietary and more centralized systems, because they value long‐term robustness over cost‐effective commercial expedience. Yet, in several cases, peer projects are unable to compete with proprietary systems. A number of factors may be the cause of this phenomenon, including the difficulty in providing proper quality of service in the early phases of a system that relies exclusively on users’ contributions; the volunteer development model, which oftentimes lacks incentives for performing routine albeit necessary tasks; the difficulty in equaling user‐friendly, sometimes non‐technical aspects of proprietary systems, such as attractive and comfortable design; or finding a straightforward business model that can successfully be associated with decentralization. Drawing on two case studies, this chapter addresses the issue of the “gaps” in peer‐based design of the technical architecture of Internet‐based services; although net architecture will be our primary focus, we will see how dynamics of motivation/incentives to participate in peer‐based systems and their attractiveness/usability are fundamentally linked to the constraints and opportunities of different architectural designs. Indeed, the chapter shows how these gaps are grounded in a mix of technical, social, and economic factors, and contributes to explain why, while user‐controlled, peer‐based decentralized alternatives to Internet‐based services have been regularly put forward in preference to Internet giants, their developers have found it challenging to compete with proprietary market leaders.
26 Makerspaces and Peer Production: Spaces of Possibility, Tension, Post‐Automation, or Liberation?
Kat Braybrooke & Adrian Smith
Makerspaces are open community workshops for peer production which offer the technical tools and training to experiment with making, learning, and hands‐on participation around material cultures. Makerspace networks provide people with skills and access to versatile design and fabrication technologies, as well as traditional hand‐tools; and they provide social spaces that foster communities who share an open and collaborative ethos interested in the possibilities that democratized design and fabrication technologies might offer personally, socially, economically and culturally. However, as well as being spaces of creative and transformational possibility, makerspaces also experience many of the tensions of our current conjuncture. Some makerspaces have become synonymous with neoliberal business‐as‐usual, where a kind of entrepreneurial citizenship is prototyped through the exploitation of precarious labor by businesses and institutions. Peer production in makerspaces sits in tension with pressures to enclose, commodify, and compete to provide profitable inputs into global manufacturing circuits. This chapter explores the dynamics of makerspaces as spaces of possibility, tension, post‐automation, and liberation, examining in particular how institutional encounters prompt makerspaces to interpret, reinforce, and challenge prevailing socio‐technical regimes in society.
27 Peer Production and State Theory: Envisioning a Cooperative Partner State
Alex Pazaitis & Wolfgang Drechsler
This chapter theoretically examines the concept of the partner state, as a new form of symbiosis between state and civil society, based on the principles and practices of peer production. The general stance of peer production advocates is almost intrinsically anti‐state. However, state theory arguably reveals that the examination of the state and its institutions actually helps us understand the position and potentials of peer production for broader social and economic transformation. A tentative union between Hegelian and Gramscian thought delineates why and how the state can, and arguably should, embrace and support peer production. Finally, a preliminary framework for the prefigurative institutions of the partner state is offered through the analysis of the concept of open cooperativism.
Part VI Conversions: Advancing Peer Production
28 Making a Case for Peer Production: Interviews with Peter Bloom, Mariam Mecky, Ory Okolloh, Abraham Taherivand, & Stefano Zacchiroli
Peer production is first and foremost a practical affair. In these interviews, practitioners involved in setting up, developing, and maintaining diverse peer‐production projects share their experiences and insights: Peter Bloom talks about the Rhizomatica project, Mariam Mecky speaks about the endeavor to create HarassMap; Ory Okolloh reflects on Ushahidi; Abraham Taherivand discusses the role of Wikimedia, and Stefano Zacchiroli provides insights into the Debian FOSS community.
29 What’s Next? Peer Production Studies?
Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, & Christian Pentzold
This chapter re‐examines the dual contribution of peer production to productive efficiency and social justice. We first interrogate each of these concepts’ potential for future research. Next, the chapter reflexively evaluates peer production as an object of study by
