If openness defines a disposition that aids peer production through conflicts and key decisions, how is such a seemingly counterintuitive attitude justified by opinionated hackers and Wikipedians? What is it that motivates participants to put aside individual differences, and leaders to allow their projects to grow in unexpected ways? In short, the answer is a dedication to a higher purpose, and in some sense a belief that a project ultimately leads a life of its own. Here again the analogy with cultural production can be drawn: successful peer production projects appear to draw on a mix of passion, reflexive contemplation, self‐importance, and charismatic leadership similar to that found in literary, artistic, and journalistic movements. This passion for the integrity of a larger whole can be seen as a unifying theme when considering participation in Wikipedia and open source projects. As O’Neil writes, dedication to a project can be understood as a critique of contemporary alienation:
[P]articipants in these projects seek a feeling of unity between their identities as consumers and producers, between their status as experts and amateurs, between their roles as leaders and followers, between their activities of work and play, and between themselves and their fellow participants in the project – a project which they see, more often than not, as a cause to defend.
(O’Neil, 2011; see also Turner’s (2009) discussion of the psychic wholeness experienced by tech workers at Burning Man)
This seeking of unity is enacted through talk of values, traditions, and identity. For example, any major change in the organizational structure of Wikipedia will undoubtedly be discussed by proponents and opponents in terms of the “purpose” of Wikipedia, making such purpose the object of debate and potentially leading to edits of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (for the most famous example of this, see discussions of the “Spanish fork,” where Spanish Wikipedians led resistance to the display of advertising on Wikipedia: e.g. Tkacz, 2014).
It may sound strange and unscientific to talk about passion in the context of Wikipedia or open source software, but this affective dimension is certainly an important factor. Here again, the analogy with cultural production is instructive: think of how often we talk about the passion or zeal of great artists and journalists. This is very similar to how Wikipedians and open source developers view senior members of their communities. Meanwhile intense feelings of community at open source conferences (Coleman, 2013) can be compared to a similar “sense of community” felt by those in participatory cultural forms such as folk music (Bohlman, 1988).
These comparisons help us to see not only the importance of emotion, but also the specificity of the “moral economy” of peer production. Here, moral economy essentially means the kinds of moral justifications underlying the specific behaviors, decisions, rules, and other forms of social activity that characterize a project. In this light, it is useful to draw here on Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework (Table 5.1) of justificatory regimes or “orders of worth.”
Table 5.1 Boltanski and Thévenot’s “orders of worth” (1999, p. 368).
Source: Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/136843199002003010.
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Inspired | Domestic | Civic | Opinion | Market | Industrial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mode of evaluation (worth) | Grace, nonconformity, creativeness | Esteem, reputation | Collective interest | Renown | Price | Productivity, efficiency |
| Format of relevant information | Emotional | Oral, exemplary, anecdotal | Formal, official | Semiotic | Monetary | Measurable: criteria, statistics |
| Elementary relation | Passion | Trust | Solidarity | Recognition | Exchange | Functional link |
| Human qualification | Creativity, ingenuity | Authority | Equality | Celebrity | Desire, purchasing power | Professional competency, expertise |
In the Table 5.1, the authors outline six “orders of worth,” each of which represents an important source of justifications for specific actions in many different social situations. For example, let’s say a project team at company X is deciding whether their software product should include a particular feature. Arguments will be put forward that appeal to the overarching value of the market – i.e., whether it will be profitable to include the feature (“the market order”). Arguments will also be made for what is most technologically appealing or efficient (“the industrial order”). And there may also be arguments for a kind of civility (“the civic order”), for example in discussion of whether the product will be compatible with open standards or competing products.
When analyzing cultures of peer production, it is important to see the role of the inspirational mode of justification, from the value placed on charisma as a quality of leadership to the emphasis placed on growing or maintaining levels of passion among project members. In my previous research (Stevenson, 2018) I outlined the importance of this moral economy in the historical development of the Perl programming language, a scripting language that was a key technology for the early World Wide Web and far outgrew its humble beginnings as a UNIX tool created for system administrators. Support for Perl and the many volunteer hours spent by developers on increasing its value could be justified in many ways – for a typical Perl developer it could be justified economically (becoming more proficient with Perl increased their job prospects), technologically (through a dedication to producing the best possible software), as well as in a civic mode (contributing to a commons that would benefit everyone). What stands out, though, is where the inspirational mode of justification was drawn upon to smooth over conflicts and provide grounds for consensus and action when this seemed to be most difficult: most notably, in a case where Perl’s grassroots volunteers and a commercial company collaborated on the Windows version of Perl. Perl’s creator Larry Wall had a keen sense of the need for the Perl community to feel inspired, and for a shared sense of Perl evolving organically rather than according to any single person’s or community’s interests. Feeling inspired, volunteers would be willing to devote significant time and energy to a project they felt carried significance beyond meeting particular technological, economic, or even civic needs. Believing that the project was bigger than any single individual’s preferences and should be allowed to evolve in unexpected ways, Perl supporters were more likely to accept when decisions they did not agree with in the first instance were made.
The case of Perl and Larry Wall confirms what
