Re: [ox-en] Project / Book
- From: Christian Siefkes <christian siefkes.net>
- Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:09:19 +0200
Hi Mathieu, Stefan, all,
Mathieu O'Neil wrote:
I suppose the central question is, would it be a good idea to have two books - one a broad-based academic resource on peer-to-peer production, governance and - ahem - property ( Athina and Phoebe: I would def. try to get Yochai Benkler - Coases Penguin or whatever - foundational author...) another a shorter and more strictly marxist-political, more engaged and focused analysis of peer production?
From one perspective [a], this might seem as too much, as "crowding the market" with similar products. Fair enough.
From another perspective [b], it would make sense - the books seen as complementary rather than competing, and though there would inevitably be a bit of overlap, this could be minimised with some collaboration between projects.
I tend to perspective [b].
And Stefan Merten wrote:
* Separate articles or a big narrative?
Mathieu outlined a number of chapters containing separate articles.
This is clearly an option. It also certainly reflects the way the
project works and patchworked thinking like this is probably quite
wide-spread.
But wouldn't it also be an option to have a big narrative? A single,
big text which starts with the beginnings and ends with an end?
Probably such a book would be more work. It is harder to write a
single text than to write a couple - especially if it is written by
several authors. But wouldn't this be nice?
I don't think that a big narrative would work, since the perspectives of
different participants differ too much. That's why we need a number of
personally signed chapters, in my opinion. Unless we want to equate Oekonux
== StefanMn's perspective or something, which would be somewhat boring in my
view...
Personally I'd strongly prefer a book for the general public. If
academics read it that's fine but in this case more average persons
are more important to me.
I agree. I also think that's an aspect where the ox book and the p2pF book
would differ.
Chapter 7: A complete social model
Content: How could a peer production society work - Siefkes' weighed
contributions, d-pool, stigmergic, etc. Other models?
Author: Christian Siefkes / Oekonux
Well, though I value Christian very much I think his concept is
fundamentally flawed. As far as I can see there are some more people
who think this way.
And while I value StefanMn I also think his approach of regarding the
generalization of peer production as a primarily technical problem is deeply
flawed (cf.
http://www.keimform.de/2009/04/01/notes-from-the-fourth-oekonux-conference-i/
), so we're very much in agreement here :-) But that doesn't matter, we can
easily present several social models in parallel. That's one of the reasons
why I think that a single big narrative wouldn't work.
Finally, I did not put in a chapter on organisation in peer
production or "peer governance" which I would be qualified to write
as this does not directly relate to capital - I'm not against it,
just thought it was a bit outside.
See above. I think the question of governance is very crucial -
especially because it is structured very differently both from
capitalism and from standard anarchist ideas.
I agree that such a chapter would be good to have.
Best regards
Christian
--
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- christian siefkes.net ---------
| Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
| Better Bayesian Analysis: | Peer Production Everywhere:
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The difference between theory and practice tends to be very small in
theory, but in practice it is very large indeed.