Reviewer: Anonymous

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

This paper offers an account of commoning as practice, beyond the traditional focus on private property and State interventions. By drawing on feminist STS scholarship and on Spinozian-Deleuzian understanding of affect, it argues for the need to approach commoning through an ethos of care and it unpacks the multiple ways whereby commoners’ engagement unfold. For these reasons, I think that the subject and its treatement are relevant to the special issue and it provides interesting insights s far as the relationship between ICT and STS from a commons-related perspective is concerned.

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

The article is well positioned in terms of literature references. The author(s) seem to sufficiently manage the different literatures (commons, affect, STS) inquired so as to draw interesting links among them. In this respect, I do not think that furthers work need to be mentioned.

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

In this respect I think that the connection between the “ethos of care” as treated by Puig de la Bellacasa and the understanding of affect as elaborated by the Spinozian-Deleuzian tradition needs more elaboration and clarifications. At the moment, indeed, the conversation between these two dimensions (care and affect) sounds more like a statement than a real conceptual framework. In the introduction of the paper, author(s) claim that approaching sociotechnical assemblages as matters of care means to conceive caring as ‘a tool to think with’. A tool that highlights “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation”…to look at the mundane, neglected, and taken for granted aspects of commoning and how the commoners-commoning relationship… this is a promising and fascinating understanding of care and caring, that in my opinion is not really unpacked through the vignettes introduced. “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” call into question dimensions of labor/work, affect/affections, ethics/politics as Puig de la Bellacasa herself points out. As she explains, these three dimensions are tied by unsolved tensions and relations that need to be scrutinized in order to characterize care as an ambivalent terrain as it is. Issues of affect, labor, and ethics are present in all the three vignettes presented. For example tensions between affective attachments and ethical issues emerge from the Mark’s story, whereas Sophie’s experience seems to uncover how the work of commoning can turn into a moral obligation and other pressures usually characterizing waged labor.
I think that both the discussions and the introduction of the case studies would benefit of a more nuanced treatment of care as not only affective disposition, but also unpaid labor with ethico-political implications. As such, author(s) would also clarify what are the relations that characterize care, affect, and commoning – which I am not able to clearly grasp as the article stands now – and the ways in which they converge.

4) Is the article well written?

The article is well written, except for a few typos. See the first quote at p. 6 “Quite different form now” > Quite different from now

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

I would recommend authors to add a brief description of the commoning practices introduced in the paper. As the paper stands now, we only know that these organizations pertain to a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) video game project, an international European non-governmental organization (NGO), and a hackerspace located in northern Europe. Although author(s) clarify that these are presented as vignettes and not as traditional case studies, I felt a bit displaced in reading each vignette. I would suggest author(s) to add 2-3 lines of the description of the organization either at the beginning of each vignette or as a footnote. I would prefer the former.

Reviewer: Anonymous

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

This paper argues that scholars studying the commons should pay more attention to the way that affect shapes the experiences of participants in commons and the activity of “commoning.” The paper situates its argument using a body of theory drawn from STS, feminist theory, and a “Spinozian-Deleuzian understanding of affect.” It uses empirical evidence primarily in the form of interview data drawn from three individuals: one who helps manage a hackerspace, another who works in a commons-focused NGO, and a third who is a lead developer for a FOSS video game.
The subject matter of the article seems relevant to the Journal of Peer Production. After all, FOSS is an archetype of peer production and commons-based peer production is frequently held up as a technologically mediated archetype of commons and commoning.
The article’s call for scholars and theorists of the commons (and of CBPP) to consider the effect of participation on participation—especially in terms of affect, is important. The key question (“How can our understanding of commoning and commoners be enriched by considering the affective
dimension of engaging with such practice?”) struck me as relevant and important.
That said, although “peer production” and “commons/commoning” are closely related, the two are not synonymous. The subject of this article is broader than just peer production—in the more narrow sense that the term is used—and it is surprising that the term “peer production” does not appear anywhere in the article. The authors could likely do more to connect their work to peer production more specifically and explicitly.

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

Although I don’t feel that I have the necessary background and familiarity to evaluate the specific use of the key theoretical texts, the engagement with theory seems more than adequate for the task the paper sets itself. I did identify some opportunities in other bodies of literatures I am more familiar with.
Given that the paper explicitly frames its contribution in terms of affect and cites feminist approaches as relevant, I was struck by the absence of any sustained engagement with the theoretical literature on “emotional labor” that has built on Arlie Hochschild’s work from the late 70s. (Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.”
American Journal of Sociology 85 (3): 551–75.) For example, Amanda Menking and Ingrid Erickson’s 2015 piece on what they call “the heart
work of Wikipedia” foregrounds gender in a way that your story does not but tells an extremely similar story and makes a similar argument that affect is an important missing dimension of accounts of the peer production and digital commons. (Menking, Amanda, and Ingrid Erickson. 2015. “The Heart Work of Wikipedia: Gendered, Emotional Labor in the World’s Largest Online Encyclopedia.” In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 207–210. CHI ’15.)

Given that the contribution of the paper emerges from the collection and analysis of empirical data on commoning, I think the work would benefit from at least a little engagement with some of the empirical work of motivation in peer production. Reviews of peer production, FLOSS, and Wikipedia research suggest that motivation is among the single most studied “questions” in empirical peer production research. Much of the research in this area suggests people contribute for reasons that are ultimately about affect. For example, Linus Torvald’s biography was titled “Just for Fun.” A more recent body of empirical work suggests that participant motivations shift over time and as individuals gain experience that parallel what you show in all three of your cases. A few more recent pieces have discussed “burnout” in ways that I think are at least worth
acknowledging. (Bezroukov, Nikolai. 1999. “Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research: Critique of Vulgar Raymondism.” First Monday 4 (10). Hertel, Guido, Sven Niedner, and Stefanie Herrmann. 2003. “Motivation of Software Developers in Open Source Projects: An Internet- Based Survey of Contributors to the Linux Kernel.” Research Policy, Open Source Software Development, 32 (7): 1159–77.) All of this work will add support for the argument that paying more attention to subjects and to affective dimensions is important. It will also situate this work’s contribution more effectively in terms of this previous work making similar arguments.
It’s a little further afield but Dorothy Howard and Lily Irani’s recent paper on “Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care” is about Wikipedia participants and is framed a way that felt to me like it had a connections to this paper’s framing in terms of an “ethos of care.” (Howard, Dorothy, and Lilly Irani. 2019. “Ways of Knowing When Research Subjects Care.” In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 97:1–97:16. CHI ’19. New York, NY, USA:)

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

The paper read to me as well-reasoned and well-argued.
One exception is in the way that the cases are introduced leaves important details about context necessary to the argument either unstated or introduced too late. For example, in the section on “Mark,” a long quote about “another episode” is introduced before we are told that the episode
focuses on dealing with harassment in the space. This context need to be introduced up front or the quote is very hard to understand.
Sophie’s story is very difficult to follow because we are told nothing about what the NGO she works with is doing. The section on Sophie begins with, “Since nine years, Sophie contributes to the NGO’s mission” without first telling us that there is an NGO or giving us any indication of what it does. We are able to infer that the Sophie’s work involves translation and the GDPR and that Sophie is a volunteer but we are never told even the basics of what the organization’s goals are, why Sophie got involved in the first place, or why it is even an example of commonsing. All seem like important things that will impact the affective nature of Sophie’s work.
Although Albert’s story has the most detail of the three, the manuscript would be improved with more context about all three of the individuals profiled. In order to understand why people might be subject to a certain affective push-and-pull, we need to understand why they are there and what they are doing.

4) Is the article well written?

In general, the article is well written, cogent, and clearly argued. There are a few small issues of language throughout. For example, “since” seems to be used in ways that felt incorrect to me in a number of places. I found the use of the terms like “institutioning” (and even “commoning”) idiosyncratic and jarring. That said, I recognize that these differences might just be differences between the scholarly language in the authors’ communities and my own.

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

The literature review subsection on “caring for neglected things” felt more like an STS greatest hits section that an specific attempt to advance our understanding of care in peer production and/or commons. For example, the text says that “Haraway’s works on interspecies relations (Haraway, 2013) or on the engagements with cyborgs and hybrid organisms (Haraway, 1997) well represent the way in which she cares and feels for those ‘topics’.” Although this seems true enough, I don’t see what this teaches us about the dynamics and politics of “care” and affect among participants in commons.