Issue 10: May 2017
Issue editors: Mathieu O’Neil (University of Canberra) and Stefano Zacchiroli (University Paris Diderot and Inria)
The increasing production of value by entities which are not compensated for their labour means the ranks of unemployed people keep growing. We often confuse being ‘unemployed’ with being ‘unworked’, but what it really means is that we are ‘unwaged’. There is a lot of work to be done, but for that to happen it needs to be separated from employment. Where does peer production fit in? On the one hand, the passionate labour and abjuration of exclusive property rights over the goods they produce of participants in peer production occur at the expense of less fortunate others, who do not have the disposable income, cultural capital, or family support to engage in unpaid labour.
On the other, we should avoid an overly singular or ‘capitalocentric’ view of the economy. New forms of solidarity can be imagined. 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. The peer-reviewed articles in this tenth issue of the Journal of Peer Production trace the contours of these emerging assemblages through case studies of an online encyclopedia, a herbarium, a scientific project, mathematical schoolbooks, and ‘maker’ activities. The Editorial Section addresses the interplay of capital and commons in firms and peer projects. It argues that it is time for the Journal of Peer Production to move beyond an exclusive focus on the institutions of the commons, in order to research and help develop the ecology, regulations and culture which can grow the commons.
Editorial Section
Making Lovework: Editorial Notes for the JoPP issue on Peer Production and Work
Mathieu O’Neil, Stefano Zacchiroli [html]
From the Commons to Capital: Red Hat, Inc. and the Business of Free Software
Benjamin J. Birkinbine [html]
Preliminary Report on the Influence of Capital in an Ethical-Modular Project: Quantitative data from the 2016 Debian Survey
Molly de Blanc, Mathieu O’Neil, Mahin Raissi, Stefano Zacchiroli [html]
Now, the Commons
Journal of Peer Production [html]
Peer Reviewed Papers
Producing a Knowledge Commons: Tensions Between Paid Work and Peer Production in a Public Institution
Lorna Heaton, Patricia Dias da Silva [html]
Crowdsourcing Citizen Science: Exploring the Tensions Between Paid Professionals and Users
Jamie Woodcock, Anita Greenhill, Kate Holmes, Gary Graham, Joe Cox, Eun Young Oh, Karen Masters [html]
Makers as a New Work Condition Between Self-employment and Community Peer-production. Insights from a survey on Makers in Italy.
Massimo Menichinelli, Massimo Bianchini, Alessandra Carosi, Stefano Maffei [html]
Communal Work and Professional Involvement: the Balance of Open Source Projects
Clement Bert-Erboul [html]
A Critical Political Economic Framework for Peer Production’s Relation to Capitalism
Arwid Lund [html]
Varia
The Journal of Peer Production now accepts unsolicited submissions of papers. If you have pertinent articles which do not fit into a special issue theme, please submit to the Varia editor, Peter Troxler, by posting to the (not publicly archived) editorial team mailing list: jopp [dash] editorial [at] lists [dot] ourproject [dot] org. We are pleased to open the JoPP Varia series with two articles:
Common sense: An Examination of Three Los Angeles Community WiFi Projects that Privileged Public Funding over Commons-based Infrastructure Management
Gwen Shaffer [html]
“Think Global, Print Local”: A Case study of a Commons-based Publishing and Distribution Model
Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel [html]