The rise in the usage and delivery capacity of the Internet in the 1990s has led to the development of massively distributed online projects where self-governing volunteers collaboratively produce public goods. Notable examples include Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects such as Debian and GNOME, as well as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. These distributed practices have been characterised as peer production, crowdsourcing, mass customization, social production, co-configurative work, playbour, user-generated content, wikinomics, open innovation, participatory culture, produsage, and the wisdom of the crowd, amongst other terms. In peer production, labour is communal and outputs are orientated towards the further expansion of the commons, an ecology of production that aims to defy and resist the hierarchies and rules of ownership that drive productive models within capitalism (Moore, 2011); while the commons, recursively, are the chief resource in this mode of production (Söderberg & O’Neil, 2014).

Peer projects are ‘ethical’ as participation is primarily motivated by self-fulfillment and validated by a community of peers, rather than by earning wages. Their governance is ‘modular’, understood in a design sense (decomposable blocks sharing a common interface), but also in political-economy terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and control by individually socializing their works into commons. Conflicting interpretations of their societal impact have been articulated (O’Neil, 2015). Skeptics view the abjuration of exclusive property rights over the goods they produce as irrelevant, and ethical-modular projects as increasing worker exploitation: participants’ passionate labour occurs at the expense of less fortunate others, who do not have the disposable income, cultural capital, or family support to engage in unpaid labour (Moore & Taylor, 2009; Huws, 2013). In contrast, reformists, often hailing from a management perspective, suggest that the co-optation of communal labour by firms will improve business practices and society (Arvidsson, 2008; Demil et al., 2015). Finally activists celebrate the abjuration of exclusive property rights, and present ethical-modular projects as key actors in a historical process leading to the supersession of capitalism and hierarchy (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014).

This last perspective raises a central challenge, which is the avoidance of purely utopian thinking. In other words, how can commons-based peer production reach deeply into daily life? How can ‘already existing non-capitalist economic processes’ be strengthened, ‘new non-capitalist enterprises’ be built, and ‘communal subjects’ be established (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 157)? An increasingly large free public goods and services sector could well cohabit in a plural economy with employment in cooperatives, paid independent work, and the wage-earning of the commercial sector. However analysis of peer production typically eschews mundane considerations such as living wages, benefits, job security, working conditions, work-induced medical conditions, and debates on labour organization. How can peer production operate as a sustainable practice enabling people to live, if labour and work issues are not formally addressed?

To advance this agenda, the tenth issue of the Journal of Peer Production, titled Peer Production and Work, calls for papers in two linked areas:

Peer production in a paid work society

Nowadays firms attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as ‘Turkers’, ‘cloud workers’ or ‘click workers’) who accomplish micro-tasks such as tagging and labeling images, transcribing audio or video recordings, and categorizing products. This extreme modularization of work results in their status being that of independent contractors rather than employees with rights, necessitating novel means of protection and redress (Irani & Silberman, 2013). The so-called ‘sharing economy’ also uses peer production methods, such as the self-selection of modular and granular tasks, to extract ever-more value from the labour of volunteer ‘prosumers’ (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015). Capitalist firms are also increasingly engaging with ethical-modular organizations, in some cases paying wages to participants. Such labour is thus both ‘alienated’, or sold, and ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to produce commons. Do traditional categories such as exploitation and alienation still apply?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

– Peer production and the global political economy
– Peer production and the rise of precarious work
– Peer workers and possibilities for worker organisation
– Does the autonomy of peer workers cause conflict in firms, and how is it resolved?
– What strategies do firms adopt to co-opt peer production (e.g., ‘hackhathons’)?
– Do tensions around property rights emerge?
– Subjectivity in peer production
– Peer production and intellectual property, coded work

Paid work in peer production projects

How does paid labour affect ethical P2P projects? Mansell and Berdou (2010) argue that firms supporting the work of programmers who contribute to volunteer projects, to the commons, will not affect the ‘cooperative spirit’ of projects; nor can this support prevent the results of labour from being socialized into commons. Is this always the case?Topics may include, but are not limited to:

– How do peer projects deal with the presence of paid or waged labour?
– Is this topic discussed within peer production projects? In what way?
– What benefits do paid or waged workers enjoy in peer projects?
– How does paid labour affect peer production projects?

Timeline

300-500 word-abstract due: 30 July 2015
Notification to authors: 30 August 2015
Submission of full paper: 31 December 2015
Reviews to authors: 15 February 2016
Revised papers: 30 April 2016
Signals due: 30 May 2016
Issue release: June/July 2016

Submission guidelines

Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by July 30, 2015 and should be sent to <work@peerproduction.net>. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/peer-review/process/
Full papers and materials are due by December 31, 2015 for review.
Peer reviewed​ papers should be around 8,000 words; personal testimonies or ‘tales of toil’ in the Processed World tradition should be up to 4,000 words.

References

Arvidsson, A. (2008). The ethical economy of consumer coproduction. Journal of Macromarketing, 8, 326-338.

Demil, B., Lecoq. X. & Warnier, E. (2015). The capabilities of bazaar governance: Investigating the advantage of business models based on open communities. Journal of Organizational Change Management, in press.

Frayssé, O. & O’Neil, M. (2015) Digital labour and prosumer capitalism: The US matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and class. Critical Sociology, 29, 123-164.

Huws, U. (2013). The underpinnings of class in the digital age: Living, labour and value. Socialist Register, 50, 80-107.

Irani, L. & Silberman, M. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2014) Network society and future scenarios for a collaborative economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Mansell, R. & Berdou, E. (2010). Political economy, the internet and FL/OSS development. In Hunsinger, J., Allen, M. & Klastrup, L. (Eds.) International handbook of Internet research (pp. 341-362). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Springer.

Moore, P. (2011). Subjectivity in the Ecologies of P2P Production. The Journal of Fibreculture FCJ-119. Online.

Moore, P. & Taylor, P. A. (2009). Exploitation of the self in community-based software production: Workers’ freedoms or firm foundations? Capital & Class, 99-117.

O’Neil, M. (2015). Labour out of control: The political economy of capitalist and ethical organizations. Organization Studies, 1-21.

Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). Introduction. Book of Peer Production (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.

This issue is dedicated to peer production, or how free software’s mode of production can apply to production of material goods, by discussing the divide between cultural and material goods (or immaterial vs. material, non-rival vs. rival, etc.) that’s hegemonic in free culture.

En Defensa del Software Libre is a journal on Free Software and Culture theory.

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• Issue #2
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States are attempting to consolidate their control over the Internet, turning it into an instrument for minute surveillance, whilst a handful of tech-corporations seek to use it as a means to manipulate human behaviour toward their own objectives and siphon off the wealth from local and national markets. In response, alternative technologies have arisen, aiming to restore the Internet’s initial values of net neutrality, distributed control, freedom of speech, and self-organization. Community networks, offline networks, darknets, peer-to-peer systems, encryption, anonymization overlays, digital currencies, and distributed online social networks appear today as examples of alternative technologies aiming at emancipation, redistribution, and maximal autonomy. However, these tools are as ambiguous as the contradictory values and claims that have been invested in them. We can therefore expect alternative infrastructures to be appropriated for ends deemed illegitimate, such as tax evasion or arms trading, thus renewing the calls for restoring “law and order” on the Internet.

Can we learn from the past and avoid the transformation of the utopian promises of these technologies into a dystopian future as, arguably, is happening to the promises of the early Internet?

In order to address such concerns, this special JoPP issue seeks to document and critically assess past and ongoing efforts to alter the commercial development process of mainstream Internet technologies in order to build viable alternatives. What are the futures awaiting these alternatives, which contradictions and ambiguities will they undergo, and which steps can be taken today to avoid failures and disappointments?

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

•Technical, social, political, economic and legal hurdles faced by alternative projects.
•The evolution of utopian imaginaries when mediated through socio-technical artifacts and the conflicting interests of multiple stakeholders.
•The strategic trade-off between “voice and exit”: going off-grid, developing offline and online alternative networks, or engaging in the public sphere on mainstream platforms.
•The politics of self-organization: actors, local and global institutions, trust, design, regulation, ambiguities. What is an “alternative” imagined to be, how is it concretely realised?
•Lessons learned from the history of the Internet and other communcation networks.
•Utopias, dystopias, and pragmatic imaginaries of the future Internet and its role in society.
•How market or state actors develop their own visions of alternative Internets to foster business interests (e.g. the proposition for a tiered Internet by dominant telecom operators) or facilitate social control (e.g. Iran’s “halalnet”).
•Hijackings and détournements of existing infrastructures to serve purposes other than those first intended.
•The environmental challenges raised by communications technologies and possible responses for ensuring their sustainability and resilience in the face of the mounting ecological crisis.

Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by February 8, 2015 and should be sent to alternets@peerproduction.net. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. Full papers and materials (peer reviewed​ papers around 8,000 words; testimonies, self-portraits and experimental formats up to 4,000 words) are due by June 31st, 2015 for review.

While the issue will be mainly comprised of academic papers, we also welcome 1-page poster-like “visual”, more or less artistic, submissions, without format restrictions, on stories from the past (alternatives to the current Internet that didn’t survive), today’s alternative technologies, real-life experiences and case studies, as well as future imaginaries. These contributions which could range from diagrams and cognitive maps to paintings, photos, installations, even poems, will be included as an appendix to the main volume. The deadline for submission is June 30st, 2015.

This special issue originated in the AlterNet seminar (London, 15-16 September 2014). For more information and inspiration, you may refer to the website.

There has been a recent growth in interest in feminist approaches to practices like hacking, tinkering, geeking and making. What started off as an interest in furthering representations of women in the technical fields of computer science and engineering, often along the lines of liberal feminism, has now grown into social, cultural, and political analyses of gendered modes of social reproduction, expertise, and work, among others. Practices of hacking, tinkering, geeking, and making have been criticized for their overtly masculinist approaches, often anchored in the Euro-American techno-centers of Silicon Valley and Cambridge that have created a culture of entrepreneurial heroism and a certain understanding of technopolitical liberation, or around the German Chaos Computer Club (CCC).

With this special issue of the Journal of Peer Production, we hope to delve more deeply into these critiques to imagine new forms of feminist technical praxis that redefine these practices and/or open up new ones. How can we problematize hacking, tinkering, geeking and making through feminist theories and epistemologies? How do these practices, in fact, change when we begin to consider them through a feminist prism? Can we envision new horizons of practice and possibility through a feminist critique?

In this call, we understand feminist perspectives to be pluralistic, including intersectional, trans, genderqueer, and race-sensitive viewpoints that are committed to the central principles of feminism–agency, fulfillment, empowerment, diversity, and social justice. We refer to the term hacking with a full understanding of its histories and limitations. That said, we use it provisionally to provoke, stimulate, and reimagine new possibilities for technical feminist practice. Hacking, as a form of subjectivity and a mode of techno-political engagement, has recently emerged as a site of intense debate, being equally lauded as a political ethos of freedom and slandered as an elitist form of expertise. These fervid economic and political ideals have been challenged and at times come under attack because they not only displace women and genderqueer within these technological communities but, more importantly, because they displace gendered forms of reflection and engagement.

Drawing on a growing community of feminist scholarship and practices, we hope to build on this momentum to invite submissions that reconceptualize the relationship between feminism and hacking. We aim to highlight feminist hackers, makers and geeks not only as new communities of experts, but as new modes of engagement and novel theoretical developments. In turn, with this special issue, we hope to challenge both concepts of feminism and hacking to ask several questions. How can feminist approaches to hacking open up new possibilities for technopolitics? Historically, hacking discourses center on political and labor aesthetics of creation, disruption, and transgression. How can feminist theories of political economy push technopolitical imaginaries towards alternate ideals of reproduction, care, and maintenance? Conversely, we also ask how notions of hacking can open up new possibilities for feminist epistemologies and modes of engagement?

We seek scholarly articles and commentaries that address any of the following themes and beyond. We are also interested in portraits, understood broadly, of feminist hackers, makers and geeks that help us better understand feminist hacker, maker and geek culture. We also solicit experimental formats such as photo essays or other media that address the special issue themes.

· What is distinctive about feminist hacking or hackers? How does feminist hacking practices help create a distinct feminist hacking culture?
· Why are feminist hacking practices emerging? Which constellation of factors help the emergence of such practices?
· What do we know about the feminist hacker spectrum? i.e. what are the differences among feminist hacking practices and how can we make sense of these distinctions?
· What tensions in hacking and/or in hacker practices and culture(s) come to the fore when feminist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and/or anti-oppression perspectives are taken?
· What does feminist hacker ethic(s) entail?
· What kind of social imaginaries are emerging with feminist hacking and hackers?
· What kinds of hacking are taking place beyond the Euro-American tradition?

Submission abstracts of 300-500 words due by September 8, 2014, and should be sent to femhack@peerproduction.net.

All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines.

Full papers and materials (peer reviewed​ papers around 8,000 words; testimonies, self-portraits and experimental formats up to 4,000 words) are due by January 31st, 2015 for review.