progressive geek communities.
5 Openness
In Benkler’s famous formulation, the success of peer production is dependent on several factors related to the envisioned product, namely that there is low uncertainty about what constitutes quality and that the product is modular and granular, meaning it can be split into independent parts and allows for both smaller and greater sized contributions. This means the project is suited for decentralized, self‐selecting producers of different levels of expertise and differing levels of commitment). What may go missing in such an economic analysis is that peer production requires more than a set of affordances, rules and procedures, and is arguably dependent on a kind of moral education of its participants. As Pentzold (2011) argues in the context of Wikipedia, participants understand the glue tying their community together not as the bureaucratic governance structure (consisting of wiki software and all of the rules and regulations guiding decision‐making on Wikipedia), but rather as shared values. “[U]sers primarily understand their collective as an ethos‐action community tying community membership not to admission procedures but to the personal acceptance of a set of moral obligations and rules of conduct” (Pentzold, 2011, p. 716). Logically, such personal acceptance will arise not just from existing preferences and previously held beliefs, but also through processes of socialization and education. An example of such moral education in service of peer production is Debian’s New Member Protocol, a form of apprenticeship that also requires an individual essay presenting one’s views on the value of open source (Coleman, 2013, p. 124)
The moral education involved in peer production will be geared towards several shared values, obligations, and rules of conduct. Perhaps most importantly, however, is instilling a disposition of openness, understood as tendencies toward humility and empathy that we associate with an “open mind.” Here it is important to see that openness is not a straightforward concept, and can refer to different things including the free access of information and technology (as in “open source code”), or a liberal political philosophy (Tkacz, 2014). The “open‐mindedness” I focus on here is a crucial part of what Reagle defines as the larger meaning of openness in Wikipedia and similar communities, namely as “an accessible and flexible type of collaboration whose result may be widely shared” (Reagle, 2012, p. 75, emphasis in original). As Reagle notes, Wikipedia’s famous policy of “neutral point of view” (NPOV) is often misunderstood as a kind of positivist notion of truth. However, in practice it is pursued “rather as a stance of dispassionate open‐mindedness” (Reagle, 2012, p. 56). In other words, neutrality and openness are articulated as an attitude or disposition.
On Wikipedia, such openness‐as‐disposition is encoded and enacted in different ways. Perhaps most important among these is the colloquial Wikipedia norm of “assuming good faith” (“Wikipedia,” 2019). Assuming good faith means taking opposing views seriously and a willingness to entertain the view that one’s own perspective is incomplete and flawed. Although prolonged flame wars get the most attention, as Reagle points out these are outweighed by civil interactions where compromise is sought and good faith is assumed on all sides. A related practice that Wikipedia encourages is “writing for the opponent” (“Wikipedia,” 2018). This challenges editors to spend more time writing and polishing points of view they themselves do not hold. Here, the guideline can be read in two ways: on the one hand it encourages openness through exposure to difference; on the other it suggests this is also the best way to convince others of your own arguments (which of course somewhat violates the principle of good faith). Regardless, it remains a practice that requires some degree of empathy and respect (Reagle, 2012, p. 58).
Importantly, while openness is often understood as an organizational goal or requirement in peer production, it must in fact be a quality of the culture. Source code that anyone can see, an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, this form of openness is relatively easy to implement and sustain through licensing. But openness in terms of remaining open to new, diverse, and challenging ideas, and to change more generally – this will never be easy, due to the hierarchical structures that emerge in any social organization. There is also evidence that growth itself in peer production projects leads to conservatism: Halfaker (Halfaker et al., 2013) show that Wikipedia’s solutions to its enormous growth over the years – formalizing policies and guidelines, using software to do mass reverts of suspect contributions, etc. – have the unintended consequence of rejecting the contributions of desirable participants, and thus discouraging them from investing more time in the project. Therefore, peer production projects must find ways to foster and maintain openness through various formal and informal means of education and socialization.
5.1 Humility and Openness in Open Source Cultures
Hacker culture and FOSS communities tend not to be associated with humility, at least in the popular consciousness. There is also a kind of romantic heroism attributed to visionary and brazen hackers who push forward with their single‐minded projects, beating the odds and showing up naysayers (Levy, 1994). A lack of humility can also be seen in the overzealous factions of different open source communities who use humor and mockery to disparage competing projects. Such in‐crowd humor builds camaraderie within one group while closing the group off to others (Coleman, 2013).
However, technical work itself is also extremely humbling. As a programmer you must continually seek support from others, and deal constantly with failure in the form of bugs and broken code. In such a context, being open to new technologies, methods and solutions, and recognizing their strengths is necessary. Openness and humility can therefore also be seen as intrinsic to technical work and in particular open source software production, which preaches releasing “early and often” and being open to the improvements suggested by others. It should also be noted such intrinsic openness extends beyond seeking optimal technical solutions, and in some ways open source culture was founded on the difficult work of inclusivity. Although the history of the rapid rise of open source software in the 1990s is sometimes presented as a cooptation of the free software movement (Morozov, 2013), in practice it required finding ways to balance the wishes of civic‐ and market‐oriented factions of the community and ensure their collaboration (Stevenson, 2018).
5.2 Gender, Identity, and Failures of Openness
To note that such openness is present in these communities is not to deny that there is a crisis of openness currently facing them. Throughout many projects and venues for open source culture, at issue now is the exclusivity that is largely associated with geek masculinity, and most notably manifest in abrasive and abusive behaviors both on‐ and offline towards women. As Reagle (2013) notes, the values of meritocracy and openness in free culture and open source communities make them vulnerable to difficult personalities, and these values can also be rhetorically deployed in ways to excuse or downplay inequality and uncivil or hostile behavior.
To combat this tendency a large number of open source communities have in recent years adopted a “code of conduct” that give more clarity about which behaviors are unacceptable and give leadership more leverage in policing behaviors (Finley, 2018). How these open communities continue to address this issue will vary in both approach and success, however it seems obvious that their fates will hinge on their ability to recognize their own biases and maximize good faith collaboration while also policing these communities. In this sense, continued interrogation of the concept of openness and its role in these communities seems like fruitful ground for both practitioners and researchers.
In sum, this section has discussed openness as a disposition that benefits peer production. Through various forms of moral education, Wikipedians and open source programmers ideally internalize a tendency towards humility and empathy, seeing competing views not as attacks to be defended against but rather as questions to be taken seriously and integrated into improving a project as a whole.
