Re: [ox-en] Democracy and peer production
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:11:13 +0200
Hi Vasilis and all!
Yesterday Vasilis Kostakis wrote:
To begin with, it is important to highlight that those opinions were
articulated almost two years ago
Sure. It is the size of my backlog which leads to such effects:
Sometimes I find the time / mind for really reading things only after
many months.
i.e., I don't think the same now, having
studied, observed and experienced peer production more in depth.
You learned new things. Great! And you share them with us. Even
greater!
Also, I
would like to apologise in advance if my thoughts are vague or irrelevant;
I suppose that the openness of this list allows such an "irrelevance" :-)
Well, I think that in a project like Oekonux openness of this kind is
absolutely needed. Only if people feel able to post incomplete
thoughts withouth being slaughtered others have the chance to tune in
and help complete things and have their bells rung. Sometimes such a
process takes years...
I believe, in a nutshell, that peer governance is a new mode of governance
and bottom-up mode of participative decision-making that is being
experimented in peer projects, such as Wikipedia or FLOSS. Thus peer
governance is the way that peer production, the process in which common
value is produced, is managed. Peer governance's main characteristics are
the equipotentiality, i.e. the fact that in a peer project all the
participants have an equal ability to contribute, although that not all the
participants have the same skills and abilities; the heterarchy as a form of
community; and the holoptism i.e. the ability for any part to know the
whole.
Great description!
Bauwens highlights that it is important
to distinguish the peer governance, in projects where a multitude of
relatively small but coordinated global groups manages its production
through co-decision and non-representative mechanisms, from the
representative democracy. Democracy is a decentralized form of decision
making and power sharing premised on elections and representatives. Thus,
Bauwens concludes that "since society is not a peer group with an a priori
consensus, but rather a decentralized structure of competing groups,
representative democracy cannot be replaced by peer governance".
I think Michel compares two things which may not be compared. What
Michel describes as *the* society is actually a society which is
shaped by a certain mode of production - namely capitalism. I agree
with Michel that a society based on abstract exchange can not be
governed by peer governance - it rather invented democracy and
democracy certainly reflects captitalism quite well. But this says
nothing about a peer production based society.
However, he
claims that peer governance and representative democracy can influence and
accommodate each other. Peer governance till now functions in the immaterial
field of abundance (in contrast to the material field where the resources
are of a scarce nature, knowledge, information and culture are resources in
abundance) and consequently there is no need for market, hierarchy or
democratic mechanisms as a form of governance to allocate scarce resources.
Even in some prominent peer projects, such as the Wikipedia, the Mozilla
foundation or the Apache foundation where there are some fixed costs (for
example servers), some people will manage the infrastructure of cooperation
on behalf of the project's community. And, as Bauwens observes: "because
they have scarce resources, you need the democratic structure".
Frankly I have no idea how Michel comes to this. What is governance
good for? To have some structure in a project and to have means to
deal with conflicts. Neither of these things have any special
relationship neither to scarcity nor to limitedness. Conflicts exist
when people do things together - they are inevitable in a way.
So no, I totally disagree that there is a fundamental difference
between maintaining scarce (i.e. capitalist society) / limited (i.e.
every society) resources. I can not see a single reason for such a
fundamental difference.
Furthermore,
Bauwens supposes that as peer projects evolve beyond a certain scale and
start facing problems of decisions concerning scarce resources, will
probably embrace some representational mechanisms. He speculates that:
"Representative and bureaucratic decision-making can and will in some places
be replaced by global governance networks which may be self-governed to a
large extent, but in any case, it will and should incorporate more and more
multistakeholder models, which strives to include as participants in
decision-making, all groups that could be affected by such actions. This
group-based partnership model is different, but related in spirit, to the
individual-based peer governance, because they share an ethos of
participation."
The question of scale is indeed an interesting one. But what does the
question of scale actually mean? The best definition I could come up
without much thinking is: A single decision has an impact on lots of
people. But doesn't a decision for the Linux kernel impacts lots and
lots of people? Doesn't an article in Wikipedia impact lots and lots
of people? So it seems to me that peer governance at least in these
instances works quite well.
Sorry for the long email (maybe as Stefan put it: "this thread comes in
handy to discuss this further") and for having (?) derailed the discussion.
Not at all, Vasilis, not at all. Thanks for your contribution.
Grüße
Stefan
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