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P2P Foundation (3 unread)

Links for 2008-07-13 [del.icio.us]

Posted: July 13th, 2008, 10:00pm PDT
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- How Should Mozilla Execute Its Vision? | Linux Journal
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- Mitchell’s Blog » Blog Archive » Mozilla Foundation Activities
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- GNOME Gets Stormy... - Blogs – ComputerworldUK blogs - The latest technology news & analysis on Outsourcing, HMRC data, Apple iPhone, Global warming, MySQL, Open Enterprise
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- Mitchell’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Second View of the Open Internet
  One can think of the Open Internet as something very specific and very concrete, as something that can be built and measured.
- Show Us a Better Way: Ideas
  Tell us what you'd build with public information and we could help fund your idea!
- VMukti : Open Source Collaborative Product Suite |Technology and Business Startups in India
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- The Open Web is a social movement | eaves.ca
  The open web is a social value. It’s not a fact, it’s not necessity, and it’s not a requirement. It’s a value - one that a growing community of people believe in and are willing to fight for.
- BSA plays the IP card against the European Commission | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET News.com
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- (Still) Defending Openness in the EU - Blogs – ComputerworldUK blogs
  Mr Blafkin's comments are worth reading in full, because they provide fascinating insight into the current tack taken by those pushing agendas based around proprietary software and intellectual monopolies.
- commonspace: More on Mozilla: communities, circles and maps
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- Pages tagged with "openeverything" on del.icio.us
- igniter: OPEN everything (Toronto) Reflection
  The first half-day OPEN everything event happened in Toronto at the Centre for Social Innovation on Wednesday and was a great start to what's going to be a very interesting series
What kind of movement is the open movement?

Posted: July 13th, 2008, 6:05am PDT by Michel Bauwens

Interesting contribution by David Eaves:

He starts his argument by stressing that the Open Web is not just a desirable physical infrastructure but a social value:

“The open web is a social value. It’s not a fact, it’s not necessity, and it’s not a requirement. It’s a value - one that a growing community of people believe in and are willing to fight for. Indeed an emergent community in support of this value, initially composed of coders and technophiles, has steadily grown in size and scope. Today, there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who believe in the open web. They want the internet to be an open platform, indeed, they know the internet must be an open platform.”

He then asks, what kind of social movement is it, and his answer is akin to Christopher Kelty’s notion of Recursive Publics:

“Embracing the notion that the open web is a social movement does not mean that we must start lobbying politicians or chaining ourselves to Microsoft servers (although some people may already be doing these things). I will be the first to admit that this social movement is very unlike those of the past. We do not need to employ the industrial and hierarchical model of influence and power that underlies the Bill Moyes document that, in part, inspired this post. It is for another era, or at least, for other movements.

This social movement is different in that, so far, it has been able to derive its power from a narrow set of people – mostly coders – who by volunteering their labour, have given the movement neither political power, nor economic power, but hard consumer power. This power has enabled projects like Mozilla to out-create, out-innovate, and out-perform the largest, best financed, and most successful software and IT companies in the world. As such, it does not need to rely on persuading government to create structural changes the way past social movements have. It has simply been able to force change through its market position.”

However, the provisional success of the movement, David acknowledges, does not mean it has nothing to learn from the past:

“Possibly the most important of these past lessons is that social movements may emerge organically but often do not succeed until at least some primitive form of organization or basic structure takes form around which resources, supporters, and eventually the general public, can coalesce.

This structure does not need to be hierarchical, but it does need to at least anchor or provide a platform around which the movement can build identity and direction. I sense a number of people look to Mozilla to be that rallying point. ”

There is a lot that could be said about the still techno-centric vision underlying this vision of a social movement, but I see this as a very clear sign of the maturation of the movement, that such discussions are taking place.

Perhaps then, this is as good a time as any to recall what inspires the P2P Foundation, which is precisely the vision of such a broad social movement, which we do not of course claim to represent, but aim to be one of the informational building blocks that it could use. The following was written in November 2005, when we launched the wiki:

“* that peer-to-peer based technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens it

* that the “distributed network” format, expressed in the specific manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of political organizing and subjectivity, and an alternative for the current political/economic order, which though it does not offer solutions per se, points the way to a variety of dialogical and self-organizing formats, i.e. it represents different processes for arriving at such solutions; it ushers in a era of ‘nonrepresentational democracy’, where an increasing number of people are able to manage their social and productive life through the use of a variety of autonomous and interdependent networks and peer circles; that global governance, and the global market will be, and will have to be, more influenced by modes of governance involving multistakeholdership

* that it creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation; and that this domain, where the cost of reproducing knowledge is near zero, requires fundamental changes in the intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free software movement; that universal common property regimes, i.e. modes of peer property, such as the General Public Licese and the Creative Commons licenses should be promoted and extended

* that the principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the General Public License, and the general principles behind the open source and open access movements, provides for models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life

* that it reconnects with the older traditions and attempts for a more cooperative social order, but this time obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralization; it has the potential of showing that the new more egalitarian digital culture, is connected to the older traditions of cooperation of the workers and peasants, and to the search for an engaged and meaningful life as expressed in one’s work, which becomes an expression of individual and collective creativity, rather than as a salaried means of survival

* that it offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values; that it creates a new language and discourse in tune with the new historical phase of ‘cognitive capitalism’; P2P is a language which every ‘digital youngster’ can understand. However, ‘peer to peer theory’ addresses itself not just to the network-enabled and to knowledge workers, but to the whole of civil society (the ‘multitudes’), and to whoever agrees that the core of decision-making should be located in civil society, and not in the market or in the state, and that the latters should be the servants of civil society

* that it combines subjectivity (new values), intersubjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and interobjectivity (new forms of organization) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and growing, but lacking ‘political self-consciousness’. It is this form of awareness that the P2P Foundation wants to promote.

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives would address the following issues:

* P2P currently exists in discrete separate movements and projects but these different movements are often unaware of the common P2P ethos that binds them

* thus, there is a need for a common initiative, which

1. brings information together;

2. connects people and mutually informs them

3. strives for integrative insights coming from the many subfields;

4. can organize events for reflection and action;

5. can educate people about critical and creative tools for world-making

* the Foundation would be a matrix or womb which would inspire the creation and linking of other nodes active in the P2P field, organized around topics and common interests, locality, and any form of identity and organization which makes sense for the people involved

* the zero node website, i.e. the site of the P2P Foundation, would have a website with directories, an electronic newsletter and blog, and a magazine. It aims to be one of the places where people can interconnect and strengthen each other, and discuss topics of common interest.

In conclusion, we have made some progress in our aims, but still need a long way to go, but at the same time, it seems clear that humanity is indeed organizing itself in the sense we are indicating above.

(If you want to support our own role in this, please consider participating in our fundraising drive, via the Tip It button at the right of this blog!!)
When crowdsourcing is exploitation

Posted: July 13th, 2008, 3:26am PDT by Michel Bauwens

Amongst the three forms of the new peer-informed economy (next to sharing and commons-oriented peer production proper), crowdsourcing is the most ‘capitalist’, and therefore could arguably be the most exploitative. I have indicated elsewhere the differences between peer production and crowdsourcing, but perhaps it bears repeating:

Peer production is defined by:

- voluntary engagement for the creation of use value, not exchange value

- a production process under the control of the participants

- universal access property regimes, i.e. universal availability of the results.

It is important that there is no direct link between input and output (non-reciprocal character of peer production), i.e. there can be no payment directly linked to the production. When there is such a link, as in paying a programmer to write a specific piece of free software, it will create a commons, but it is not peer production.

Most corporate-driven crowdsourcing will only apply the very first principle, i.e. voluntary engagement but in this case the hope is that it is sold, i.e. it is produced for exchange value, not use value; the companies will aim to drive and control the production process; and the results will be proprietary. Finally, they will introduce payment or Revenue Sharing schemes. In terms of the hierarchy of engagement, crowdsourcing is more akin to swarming than to the collective intelligence of an intentional community, which is the characteristic of peer production only.

So if there is profit sharing, it changes the dynamics and is not peer production. But even worse can be when corporations start making you work, just for their benefit, and without any guarantee that you will get paid for your work. So there is a difference between producing for an open marketplace, where many might by, or not, your product, and when a company asks you to design something specific, but without any guarantee of payment.

This is what is meant with the concept of speculative work. In this model, corporations invite you to design, but will only pay for some of the inputs,it might be yours, or it might not.

Here’s the official explanation from the NoSpec campaign:

“Spec has become the short form for any work done on a speculative basis. In other words, any requested work for which a fair and reasonable fee has not been agreed upon, preferably in writing.

In a nutshell, spec requires the designer to invest time and resources with no guarantee of payment.”

In a commentary on this trend, Andrew Hyde is very clear: Speculative work (asking someone to complete a job as an application is a loose promise to pay them if you want to) is evil.

And now, he writes, speculative work is taking on the role and identity of crowdsourcing, as in the activities of the Crowdspring project:

“CrowdSpring is a site that attracts people with small budgets for projects ($250 for a company logo) and designers to come up with the designs, including revisions, for clients, with the chance of getting paid. It is speculative work, almost at its worst.

Why is this such a big deal?

Design, unlike other industries is unique in that the intellectual property is put into your deliverable, and when the client asks for you everything you have to put into the project to think about purchasing. I am a designer and this is by far the easiest way to end a friendship with me (asking me or someone else).”

Andrew insists that specwork is different from the selling platforms such as istockphotos:

“Not understanding the difference between custom speculative work and selling art backs up my first thought that there is a major ethical vacuum and lack of understanding around design at CrowdSpring.

Going head to head and undermining/ underbidding an entire profession is not something to be done unless you can carry the torch for the industry in the name of good (INGdirect comes to mind).

Is There a Grey Area?

Yes, but very few. Volunteering. I do a lot of volunteer jobs that can be viewed as spec work. As a general rule I only volunteer for non profits that don’t have the energy/ time to look for a designer for a project. I also see some grey when it comes to community contests where a professional designer is hired to take the winner and develop it to the final.”

For example, bearing this distinction in mind, Andrew appreciates Threadless:

“Bandwagon fallacies don’t work for a lot of things, including this. If you are talking about ThreadLess, they have done a very good job a) paying their designers fair market value b) involving a community in the beauty of design that traditionally would have been left out and c) making clear that the designs are done for the love of design, not for a 3rd party to profit off of.”