Peer production has often been described as a ‘third mode of production’, irreducible to State or market imperatives. The creation and organisation of peer projects takes place without ‘managerial commands or price signals’, without recourse to bureaucratic apparatuses or the logic of competitive markets. Instead, and mimicking the technical architectures upon which many peer projects are based, production is described as non-hierarchical and decentralised. Group dynamics are equally flattened out — and such flattening is captured, of course, in the very notion of the ‘peer’. This issue of the Journal of Peer Production (JoPP) seeks to scrutinise and advance these earlier understandings of peer production through the exploration of value and currency.

In sociological and economic thought, the historical distinction between ‘values’ and ‘value’ split the non- or at least less-easily-calculable with the seemingly cold and objective world of calculation and universal commensurability. This ‘old settlement’, which never really held, nevertheless helped demarcate the economic from the social. But the intensification and extension of computational procedures, which is manifested most clearly in the rise of big data, has lead to a proliferation of bottom-up procedures to formalise (social) values, rendering them easily calculable and lending order to the decentralised world of peers, but without necessarily replicating capitalistic calculations of value. Order in this sense is iterative, recursive and topological. In place of managerial commands and bureaucratic hierarchies we have Karma points and the long-tail logic of networks.

Practices of valuation and expressions of worth are rife in peer production. Wikipedia contributors, for example, have long awarded each other ‘barnstars’ for valued service in a range of areas, and the site has long explored ways of rating article quality. These valuing procedures formally began, perhaps, with ‘progressive grading schemes’ (see Tkacz, 2007) and have now evolved into more sophisticated ‘rate this page’ metrics, embedded in the bottom of article pages. On a more mundane level, formal procedures are necessarily in place to determine the inclusion-worthiness of individual contributions. Quality control, in other words, rests on a theory of worth. Even meritocracies must define what constitutes merit.

The flip-side of this issue is currency: the marriage of cryptography and the dynamics of open-source have now produced a working distributed currency system. The third mode of production has produced a new market architecture, an awkward alliance between the commons and the private market, in joint antagonism with the State. Bitcoin, as the most notable example, can be understood as a new technics of exchange inspired by the animal spirits of crypto-libertarianism. Whether or not there is a place for currency — and therefore exchange and (economic) value — in the utopian visions of commons-oriented thought is contested. Meanwhile, hybrid forms like Bitcoin are developing unhindered by their constitutional paradoxes. Capitalism, after all, equally thrives atop what David Graeber has called a ‘baseline’ or ‘everyday’ communism. Parasites abound, and the relation between the parasite and the common requires further consideration (see Pasquinelli, 2008).

Current developments of digital currencies are also pervaded by a number of tensions and matters of concern that revolve around the act of creation. ‘Let there be money, and there was money’, but who or what has issued this money? What is the source of the collective agreement to concede value? Is it a commodity-object (like gold), an entity (like the State in the case of fiat), or a particular ethos (as in Karma)? What forms of control are coded into currency systems and who is guiding processes of (re)design? Who plays the role of guarantor when a currency is decentralized? How is the ‘price’ and worth of the currency established once it is out in the world? And, how do experimental currencies sit in relation to the debit-credit duality (e.g. Bitcoin has been said to be debit money, while Ripple has been said to be credit money)?

Finally, the question of trust factors into experimental currencies on multiple levels. Digital currency systems exist because advancements in public key cryptography have developed ways to verify the legitimacy of a morsel of digital information. In this sense, trust takes on a technical quality, whose authority lies with the science of mathematics. That is, we trust that the science behind the crypto-currency will hold in adversarial conditions. But we also trust that currency designers are benevolent and we trust in their expertise and coding competence. How is trust secured in these conditions, how is it perceived, and how do such perceptions feed back into the value and uses of the currency? Bitcoin, it seems, has garnered enough trust to create a working system of exchange, while the Canadian Mint’s proposal for a similar system seems to have failed (on the level of trust) over concerns of increased state surveillance.

This issue of The Journal of Peer Production invites contributions on the themes of value and currency as they relate to peer production. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• Local, alternative and crypto-currencies;
• Decentralised currencies;
• Non-coercive taxation systems and/or experiments/experiences;
• Analog/pre-digital (or historical) networks for distributed value exchange;
• Currency and design;
• Currencies and the commons;
• Life after fiat (the becoming-uncertain of taxes);
• What does/should peer production value?;
• Re-thinking the constitution of value;
• Theories of non-monetary value and worth;
• The relationship between valuing practices and project hierarchies;
• Value, values and peers;
• Forms of belief in peer production;
• Automated systems of ranking and distributing value;
• Theories of exchange, gift and voluntarism;
• Trust and anonymity in the building of value;
• Intermediation and ‘guarantees’ in P2P exchanges.

Submission proposals of under 500 words due by 28 January 2013 and should be sent to n.tkacz (at) warwick.ac.uk. Accepted submissions will be notified during February and full papers (approximately between 4,000 and 10,000 words) are due by 22 July 2013. All article submissions are peer reviewed according to JoPP review policies.

From the perspective of social organization, Free Software can be conceived as a form of critique by adaptability and modifiability, as pointed out by anthropologist Christopher Kelty [Two Bits, 2008], standing outside institutionalized forms of power and providing working alternatives as critical tools. Starting from this kind of understanding, Free Software has been interpreted as a form of critique toward consolidated and contemporary capitalistic forms, such as the extension of Intellectual Property over any kind of common pool resources, or the forms of organization of labour of distributed developers.

Nevertheless, the increasing adoption of Free Software by multi-national corporations points to increasing domestication of free software practices by contemporary global capitalism and to the expansion of hierarchical forms of social organization. This is particularly apparent in the form of the Open Source dialect, through the extensive overlapping of open source discourse with capitalistic discourses, such as that on legitimate hybrid business models, combining open source and proprietary licensing.

Such perspective requires that the critical power of Free Software be brought under scrutiny, moving from the undermining of the discourses of Intellectual Property, organization of work or hierarchy, to the understanding of the epistemological implications for computer science and software engineering. From this point of view, arguments that see the epistemology of computing as the locus of production and reproduction of long-standing inequalities in power relationships, are suggesting new areas of enquiry. Is Free Software a form of critique of the epistemological basis of computing? Is it possible to connect its critique of Intellectual Property and organizational forms to the critique of software development premises as a professional and research practice?
Those are the questions this special issue is trying to answer. To promote an interdisciplinary debate, we encourage submissions of theoretical and empirical papers authored both by social scientists, in a broad sense, and by computer scientists (joint papers are most welcome). We expect the authors to envision the potential for Free Software of being a form of cultural, practical, and material critique.

Call: 500-word abstract

Important Dates:

August 31st, 2012: Abstract Submission (max 500 words)
September 15, 2012: Abstract Evaluation and Communication
December 15th, 2012: Full Paper Submission
February 15th, 2013: First Review Completion
May 15th, 2013: Final Submission
June 2013: Signalling and Publication

Submissions:

Through contact form or straight to the editors, via email at maurizio@ahref.eu and vincenzo.dandrea@unitn.it

The Journal of Peer Production (JoPP) is a new open access, online journal that focuses on the implications of peer production for social change.

Call: 500-word abstract

Both theoretical and empirical contributions accepted

During the past two decades, hacking has c

hiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely. In this special issue of Critical Studies in Peer Production, we will investigate how these ideas and practices are spreading. Two cases which have caught much attention in recent years are open hardware development and garage biology. The creation of hacker/maker-spaces in many cities around the world has provided an infrastructure facilitating this development. We are looking for both empirical and theoretical contributions which critically engage with this new phenomenon. Every kind of activity which relates to hacking is potentially of interest. Some theoretical questions which might be discussed in the light of this development include, but are not restricted to, the politics of hacking, the role of lay expertise, how the line between the community and markets is negotiated, how development projects are managed, and the legal implications of these practices. We welcome contributions from all the social sciences, including science & technology studies, design and art-practices, anthropology, legal studies, etc.

Interested authors should submit an abstract of no more than 500 words by July 20, 2011. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by July 31. All papers will be subject to peer review before being published.

Abstracts should be sent to delfanti@sissa.it.

Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP) is a new open access, online journal that focuses on the implications of peer production for social change.