Reviewer: Mathieu O’Neil

1. Is the subject matter relevant?
Yes, the subject is relevant to JoPP.

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?
I am sympathetic with the authors’ purpose (articulating how a fairer, more sustainable, creative etc society based on “open source” principles might operate).

That said, there are some issues with the approach.

Worker rights
-”Collaborative consumption” has been criticised for enabling apps to set prices arbitrarily. What about labour rights? Who guarantees contractors with no stability will not be exploited? How does regulation occur? Etc In this context CC seems little more than another round of union-busting.
See:
Asher-Schapiro, Avi (2014) “Against sharing”, Jacobin Magazine. September. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/against-sharing/ Scholz, T. (2014) Crowdmilking. 2014 Grafstein Lecture in Communications, University of Toronto Law School
Tufekci and King 2014) We can’t trust Uber, The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/opinion/we-cant-trust-uber.html

True social impact of open source economics (OSE)
We all agree that OSE are a fine thing, but how many people are actually involved? Percentage of the working population? Class, educational barriers to entry? Elitism? Capacity to feed and house people? Without an awareness of these issues there is a risk of utopian thinking detached from actual reality.

Other visions of OSE
How does this differ / improve on other visions of OSE? Christian Siefkes? Michel Bauwens? Etc

3. Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?
How would such a society come about? Violent revolution? What about those who don’t want to do it themselves? Will they be forced, or reeducated?

It’s highly improbable that capitalism will disappear all at once and that OSE will reign everywhere. A more likely scenario is that communal / collaborative systems will cohabit with markets. Here is a quote from JoPP

“That production and reproduction inevitably compose a system does not mean that there is only one system, albeit a dominant one! It is vital to understand the fact that we belong to a plurality of systems, effective totalities which determine us materially more than we determine them, but in the gaps between which we can function. Indeed, against the contemporary individualistic gospel, a system is defined by the relatively independent operations of the elements which constitute it. No isolated individuals can fail to be integrated into a system on which they depend and which constrains them, like the transport system.  (…) The totalitarian tendency of markets, with their liberal theories which do not recognize any value to non-commercial phenomena, has driven the fact that we belong to different systems of production into the background. However, it is a fact that there is no such thing as an economy which is not a mixed economy, a plural economy, where at the very least domestic, public and commercial exchanges coexist. “ http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/invited-comments/changing-the-system-of-production/

4. Is the article well written?
Yes, no major issues there

5. Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?
Not really, see above.

Suggestions for improvement:
Need to be more realistic about current (obstacles to) participation / adoption in OSE
Need to address critiques of collaborative consumption as undermining labour rights and by extension question of how such rights would be protected in horizontal OSE
Need to address hybridity in work / production regimes

Reviewer: Anonymous

1. Is the subject matter relevant?
The subject matter is the “reMaker society”, an theoretical concept that links together diverse socio-technical apparati into a new social whole. The tenets of reMaker society are closely linked with peer production – its practices, ethics, and ideology, and it is hence very relevant to readers of the journal.

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 doing a good job integrating varied social and technological novelties under the umbrella of the reMaker society. Its descriptive aspect is very good, detailed, and well-written.

However, I feel that the article is lacking in advancing a cogent and well-constructed argument. It is unclear what the more analytical and/or theoretical points are. The presentation of the notion the reMaker society is cogent, but at the end, it reads like reiterating a dogma, or a manifesto. I think it would be more appropriate to engage with this notion more forcefully.

It would be very helpful to locate the discussion on the reMaker society within a certain body of knowledge, a certain field, and set the it vis a vis other notions – competing, complementing, etc. As it now stands, the article feels too much like an ideological polemic. The structure of the argument reads a little like a confrontation between one ideology, or theology and another. The attempt to refute the tenets of the reMaker society are not very clear to me.

The task of the article can be more ambitious. And I see many seeds for such a project already laid out in the article but a little under-developed. One approach the authors can take is focusing on the ideological facet of the reMaker society, locating it within an ideological spectrum (is OSE mainly a libertarian movement? Does it diverge from that? Is it post-capitalist). Another approach, which is there in the article but which I think is underdeveloped (two paragraphs on pp. 13-14) is to offer a more structural analysis which shows the reliance of the reMaker society on capitalism. That would accentuate the contradictions that are also present in that worldview and could make for a very intriguing argument.

The part about the techno-utopian rhetoric is weak and doesn’t add any analytical weight to the discussion. I cannot see the point in merely pointing out that discourse X is utopian. It is not enough. The sociological task is to link a certain utopia with another social construct. Every speech act can be analyzed as utopian, ideological, performative, and so forth. That is just the beginning of the analysis. The question might be what is unique about the techno-utopian discourse of the reMaker society? What its uniqueness related to? What can we learn from it? In other words, assuming we agree that the reMake society discourse is utopian, in what way does that advance a sociological argument?

In sum, I think the central problem with the article is that the main rhetorical driver is a polemic between two interpretations of reality rather than a theoretical polemic.

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

4. Is the article well written?

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

Reviewer: Anonymous

1. Is the subject matter relevant?
The authors made a laudable effort to connect the political potential of Free and Open Source-based, collaborative production with pressing questions of environment protection, individualization, consumerism, and the creation of alternative modes of production. They also responded to the call for this JoP issue in their discussion of a new approach to “making” under the rubric of “re-making” in order to foreground ecological issues.

“Making” is a very timely topic, given the celebration of all things Open Source™ without the reflection upon the very infrastructures of exploitative industrial arrangements which support the so-called “maker movement”.

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 treatment of the subject is very engaging. It represents an important contribution to the debate on the promise of “making” as an anti-consumerist collective practice and a political potential for cooperative, non-alienated labor. However, there is no evidence of empirical research (no information about the construction of the object of inquiry, no discussion of method or empirical work), so the article reads like an essay, which is most welcomed, but it has to be clarified in the introduction.

After their brief literature review, I would recommend including the discussion about “re-embedding” of economy through the discussion of moral economies (this literature is very productive for the treatment of commons-based peer production). The main sources are well known: E.P. Thompson (1971, 1991), James Scott (1976), and more recently, Didier Fassin (2012) for a good review and update. The authors  can “snowball” many other references from these ones.

The literature on the “gift” (don) and exchange in economic anthropology is also very important for the debate on substantive and moral economies of maker/hackerspaces and Free and Open Source communities (since they overlap to a great deal). Citing this literature can be way to reconnect the authors’ lit-review from the intro with the presentation of the “re-maker distributive political economy”, thus “re-embedding” the economic, political, environmental and sociotechnical.

Despite having several references to the “Open Source technics”, the small but relevant body of literature on Free and Open Source is conspicuously absent from the article. Given the framing of the authors’ narrative, I would recommend, at least, point to these studies. There are public lists of bibliographies for the authors to use:
https://www.zotero.org/groups/anthropology_of_floss_free_libre_open_source_software
And:
https://www.zotero.org/groups/foss

I would recommend for the authors to fix some of the problematic and unsupported claims that were made in the body of the text about commons-based peer production (without specification) and “Open Source technics” (using the literature on F/OSS technologies). I marked with comments the sections of the text that need attention.

3. Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?
Yes, but they can be easily addressed.  To improve the article, it would be better to offer a more balanced view on the “maker movement” (despite the propositive, essayistic overall tone of the piece). For this purpose, I would recommend reflecting upon a set of interviews on “critical making” republished by the Journal “Critical Theory” (Ctheory). The authors already engage with “critical making” in terms of their goals and aspirations with their piece, so why not mention and discuss this quite active, parallel domain of debate and activity?

I would also call attention to the authors’ usage of books on the “maker movement” which seems to suggest that they accept the journalistic discourse on its “disruptive” nature without further questioning.

4. Is the article well written?
The article is well-written. It is also propositive, theoretically rich, and presents a well-crafted argument. I have many observations about the lack of empirical evidence and support for many claims about Open Source communities and their exchange practices, which I included in my commentaries in the body of the article. They can be easily addressed to make the piece stronger.

5. Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?
All in all, the piece could be made more concise by editing the claims that are made about Open Source and the “maker movement” that are not supported by the literature or empirical research on these topics. Bringing to the intro that the piece is part-sociological essay part-manifesto on the virtues of re-making (in opposition to “making” as a hobby for suburban dads in Euro-American contexts) will help the authors make a stronger case.

I marked throughout the text the sections which need further elaboration vis-à-vis the literature on commons-based peer production and, in particular, Free and Open Source technologies and communities.

Suggestions for improvement:
There are issues regarding a few unsupported claims about commons-based peer production. In order to improve the article, I suggest being upfront about its essaystic character (and trim down the article accordingly to make it more concise). Also, I would recommend referencing the debate on “critical making” and the literature on moral economy and Free and Open Source communities. The introduction lacks a section on what “Open Source Ecology” is and how it came about (the article does a good job in telling us why it is important). The article would benefit enormously by focusing solely on Open Source Ecology and “re-making” than shifting from fablabs to makerspaces and Open Source projects (without proper specification and contextualization).