O’Neil, M., Pentzold, C. & Toupin, S. (2021) The Handbook of Peer Production. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
This landmark work maps the origins and manifestations of peer production, discusses the factors that are advancing and co-opting it, and considers peer production’s potential consequences for the social order.
HoPP: Extracts
Chapter 29 – What’s Next? Peer Production Studies? (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
This brings us to the political economy of academic publishing, to which the Handbook of Peer Production belongs. The Handbook is published by a large commercial publisher and as such incorporates business practice and regulations which are clearly at odds with the principles of peer production. In line with international divisions of labor in contemporary academic publishing, the editing, proofreading, and indexing for this work have been performed by workers in the Global South (namely, India). Further, the terms of the contract governing the intellectual property of this work are restrictive. We made the case that prohibiting free public access behind a paywall was inopportune in the case of a topic such as peer production. Our entreaties were in vain; perhaps we should have pushed harder. In the end this is not surprising: in a capitalist society, it is not unusual for people to access material that is partly or wholly anti-capitalist through capitalist means of distribution (starting with Marx’s Capital). In addition, the contract does allow authors of individual chapters to make preprints available on their institutional repositories, but it forbids setting up a “table of contents” webpage that would aggregate links to these individual chapters and repositories. We are not going to create such a page ourselves, as this would violate the terms of our contract. However, there can be little doubt that the nature of this work and the contradiction inherent in paywalling it will impel other people to set up one, or several, such aggregated tables of content. (p. 394)
Chapter 30 – Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
Table 30.1 Be Your Own Peer: Principles (p. 399)
Table 30.2 Be Your Own Peer: Policies for the common good (p. 402)
HoPP: Preprints
Chapter 7 – Prophets and Advocates of Peer Production (George Dafermos)
Chapter summary: From the beginning, boosters of peer production portrayed it as heralding a better way of life. Since then activists and researchers have detected in peer production the seeds of a post‐capitalist society (Oekonux Project, P2P Foundation) or worked to help policy makers and governments transition towards commons‐based models (FLOK Society Project). Others have attempted to engage critical intellectuals inside and outside academia (Journal of Peer Production) and to establish peer production as a promising research field in the social sciences (P2P Lab). This chapter retraces the history of these attempts, teases out their differences and convergences, and evaluates their impact.
Chapter 28 – Making a Case for Peer Production: Interviews with Peter Bloom, Mariam Mecky, Ory Okolloh, Abraham Taherivand & Stefano Zacchiroli (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
Peer production is first and foremost a practical affair. In these interviews, practitioners involved in setting up, developing, and maintaining diverse peer‐production projects share their experiences and insights: Peter Bloom talks about the Rhizomatica project, Mariam Mecky speaks about the endeavor to create HarassMap; Ory Okolloh reflects on Ushahidi; Abraham Taherivand discusses the role of Wikimedia, and Stefano Zacchiroli provides insights into the Debian FOSS community.
Chapter 29 – What’s Next? Peer Production Studies? (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
Chapter summary: This chapter re‐examines the dual contribution of peer production to productive efficiency and social justice. We first interrogate each of these concepts’ potential for future research. Next, the chapter reflexively evaluates peer production as an object of study by mapping a network of peer‐production researchers and by considering whether a field of “peer production studies” has emerged, as well as how such a field is structured. The questions that animate this chapter are: How should we think about peer production? How are other people thinking about it? What is it good for, in analytical terms, exactly? Should peer production become a field of study?
HoPP: Table of contents
Preface
Author biographies
Chapter summaries
List of tables
List of figures
Part I – Introduction
Chapter 01 – The Duality of Peer Production: Infrastructure for the Commons, Free Labor for Firms (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
Part II – Concepts: Explaining Peer Production
Chapter 02 – Grammar of Peer Production (Vasilis Kostakis & Michel Bauwens)
Chapter 03 – Political Economy of Peer Production (Benjamin Birkinbine)
Chapter 04 – Social Norms and Rules of Peer Production (Christian Pentzold)
Chapter 05 – Cultures of Peer Production (Michael Stevenson)
Chapter 06 (reprint) – Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue (Yochai Benkler & Helen Nissenbaum)
Part III – Conditions: Enabling Peer Production
Chapter 07 – Prophets and Advocates (George Dafermos)
Chapter 08 – Virtue, Efficiency, and the Sharing Economy (Margie Borschke)
Chapter 09 – Openness and Licensing (Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay)
Chapter 10 – User Motivations in Peer Production (Sebastian Spaeth & Sven Niederhöfer)
Chapter 11 – Governing for Growth in Scope: Cultivating a Dynamic Understanding of How Peer Production Collectives Evolve (Rebecca Karp, Amisha Miller & Siobhan O’Mahony)
Part IV – Cases: Realizing Peer Production
Chapter 12 – Free & Open Source Software (Stéphane Couture)
Chapter 13 – Wikipedia and Wikis (Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin)
Chapter 14 – Hacker Cartography: Participatory Mapmaking and Technological Power (Adam Fish)
Chapter 15 – Peer Learning (Panayotis Antoniadis & Alekos Pantazis)
Chapter 16 – Biohacking (Morgan Meyer)
Chapter 17 – Makers (Yana Boeva & Peter Troxler)
Chapter 18 – Blockchain (Pablo Velasco Gonzáles & Nate Tkacz)
Chapter 19 – Wireless Community Networks (Gwen Shaffer)
Chapter 20 – Commoning the Urban (Nicholas Anastasopoulos)
Part V – Conflicts: Peer Production and the World
Chapter 21 – Peer Production and Social Change (Mathieu O’Neil & Sébastien Broca)
Chapter 22 – Peer Production and Collective Action (Stefania Milan)
Chapter 23 – Feminist Peer Production (Sophie Toupin)
Chapter 24 – Postcolonial Peer Production (Maitrayee Deka)
Chapter 25 – Gaps in Peer Design (Francesca Musiani)
Chapter 26 – Makerspaces and Peer Production: Spaces of Possibility, Tension, Post-Automation, or Liberation? (Kat Braybrooke & Adrian Smith)
Chapter 27 – Peer Production and State Theory: Envisioning a Cooperative Partner State (Alex Pazaitis & Wolfgang Drechsler)
Part VI – Conversions: Advancing Peer Production
Chapter 28 – Making a Case for Peer Production: Interviews with Peter Bloom, Mariam Mecky, Ory Okolloh, Abraham Taherivand & Stefano Zacchiroli
Chapter 29 – What’s Next? Peer Production Studies? (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
Chapter 30 – Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)