{"id":6005,"date":"2017-05-06T07:13:15","date_gmt":"2017-05-06T07:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=6005"},"modified":"2017-06-06T09:58:33","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T09:58:33","slug":"makers-as-a-new-work-condition-between-self-employment-and-community-peer-production-insights-from-a-survey-on-makers-in-italy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-10-peer-production-and-work\/peer-reviewed-papers\/makers-as-a-new-work-condition-between-self-employment-and-community-peer-production-insights-from-a-survey-on-makers-in-italy\/","title":{"rendered":"Makers as a New Work Condition Between Self-employment and Community Peer-production. Insights from a survey on Makers in Italy."},"content":{"rendered":"

By Massimo Menichinelli, Massimo Bianchini, Alessandra Carosi, Stefano Maffei<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h2>\n

The development and adoption of digital technologies in the past few decades has introduced new working conditions and modified some of the existing ones. New forms of organisation and new forms of distribution of resources have been enabled (or old forms have been modified or rendered obsolete) especially thanks to infrastructures such as the Internet (a global network of devices and technologies) and the World Wide Web (a global network of information and documents). Furthermore, there are also protocols and softwares that manage the interaction between both of these networks. Digital technologies have always been in part digital and immaterial with data and software, and physical and material with hardware and connections. This ecosystem has enabled the emerging of new forms of work, organisation, business and economic activity in many fields such as music, biotechnology, movies, science, art and so on, including design. Free Software, Open Source, Peer-to-Peer, Crowdsourcing, Sharing Economy, Diffuse, Distributed and Decentralised Systems are some of the many new definitions created in order to understand better the new phenomena of organisation of work emerged from the adoption of digital technologies, and especially the Internet and the World Wide Web. The concept of peer production emerged as a framework that aims at identifying the common traits in all these definitions regarding a new and relevant way of organising the work of distributed and autonomous individuals within the production and distribution of digital content characterised by collaborative practices, rather than competitive ones (Benkler, 2002).<\/p>\n

This digital content, thanks also to the digitalisation of an increasing amount of types of information, encompasses many fields and disciplines, making peer production a promising means of organising knowledge work in future years. A new and relevant way for organising work on digital content, could also be restated as a new and relevant way for organising the design of digital content, understanding design both as \u201cto plan and make decisions about (something that is being built or created)\u201d or \u201cto create the plans, drawings, etc., that show how (something) will be made\u201d. Both are definitions of design according to the Merriam Webster dictionary (\u201cDesign\u201d, 2015), and could refer to a general or broader (or even informal) activity of developing a content or project (i.e., like professionals who are not trained as designers or amateurs do) or to developing a project following the methods, culture, history, tools and roles of the Design discipline (i.e., designers). For example, software is digital content that can be \u201cdesigned\u201d (usually by people formally trained in software development, computer science and engineering, but increasingly by people with informal training); the design of websites is a specific form of software (and therefore digital content) that can be designed (usually by people formally trained in design, art, architecture, but increasingly by people with informal training).<\/p>\n

Therefore, peer production can be applied to Design, but other phenomena in the past two decades have shown that it could be applied also to non-digital Design projects. As we have seen, digital technologies are both immaterial and material, physical and digital. Increasingly, the adoption of peer production is taking place not only in the context of the development of digital and immaterial content, but also during the design, manufacturing and distribution of physical goods. Furthermore, Open Design and Open Hardware projects are developed, discussed, manufactured and distributed thanks to digital fabrication and communication technologies, advanced funding initiatives (like crowdfunding platforms and hardware incubators) and globally integrated supply chains. This new systemic dimension of work is possible, among other factors, thanks to local facilities like Fab Labs, Makerspaces and Hackerspaces, where individuals can gather and form communities with other people, designing and manufacturing together. Such spaces represent the physical and geographically-located presence of the whole Maker movement, generally considered as a global community with collaborations taking place locally and globally at the same time. There are differences among these facilities, and the discussion about their definition is an ongoing effort: Within this paper we prefer to refer to them as Maker Laboratories, since the commonly used term \u201cMakerspace\u201d identifies only one part of the global community (Menichinelli, 2016), and the \u201cShared Machine Shops\u201d term might not be always suitable to all of these labs, which in several cases have a limited set of machines and act more as a community place, especially in the Italian context that is the focus of this article (Menichinelli and Ranellucci, 2015).<\/p>\n

Generally, the participants of this movement are referred to as Makers, and, while their existence is still an emerging phenomenon, it is widely acknowledged that they could exemplify a new and promising modality of work that reconnects people with traditions of manufacturing and craftsmanship, that enable more meaningful and empowering autonomous jobs and that joins creativity and social networks and impact (Anderson, 2012; Hatch, 2014). The dimension and impact of the Maker movement is a topic that is still understudied, but few studies showed that everyday citizens already innovate products by hacking them: Eric von Hippel and his collaborators found that in the UK, USA and Japan millions of citizens are engaging in consumer innovation activities related to products, and that their effort could be invaluable for the industry, especially in the UK, where such effort has been calculated to surpass the national companies\u2019 R&D expenditures on consumer products (von Hippel et al., 2010; von Hippel et al., 2011). Such product hacking activities could be considered partially as related to a broad Maker movement, and they could also be improved by connecting such citizen innovators with existing Maker communities and Maker Laboratories that could foster such phenomenon and link it with industry. The physical dimension of digital technologies is now recognised as a promising dimension, and there is an increasing interest in developing products and services in this domain, rather than just digital services: Objects and manufacturing are increasingly digitalised (Anderson, 2010; Gershenfeld, 2005).<\/p>\n

If Makers adopt, even if partially, peer production strategies, an analysis of their working and economic conditions could provide insights regarding the work dimension of the peer production of physical objects. This could expand the possibilities of peer production, which has been mostly tied to digital content so far. Furthermore, such analysis could give more insights on the sustainability of such practices and therefore be a starting point for suggesting policies for facilitating the sustainable development of such practices. This article addresses this issue by addressing the following related questions, but limiting the answers to the Italian context:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. What are the working conditions of Makers?<\/li>\n
  2. How is peer production with physical goods taking place in the work of Makers?<\/li>\n
  3. How are the working condition of Makers related to current social and economic trends?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In order to answer these questions, we adopted two approaches: a literature review (in order to understand existing approaches and the current social and economic situation) and an open online survey (in order to understand the emerging condition of Makers in Italy). We investigated the knowledge, values and working dimensions of Makers in Italy with the Makers’ Inquiry online survey. This research generated a first overview of the phenomenon in Italy (Bianchini et al., 2015), identifying the profiles of such Makers: An important step, because Makers are usually defined in a very broad way. Furthermore, we investigated their profiles regarding their values and motivations, in order to understand how much Makers engage in peer production or in traditional business practices, whether they work with open source and collaborative processes or individually, whether their communities have a strong role in their work or they are just a dimension with limited relevance. We then investigated their emerging business and working conditions: their market, expenses and commercial strategies, and the patterns regarding the ownership, access and use of manufacturing technologies. Finally, we compared these profiles with data regarding traditional designers and businesses and national context from existing literature.<\/p>\n

    Peer production and Makers: Physical things, physical places<\/h2>\n

    The Internet and the World Wide Web have allowed the scaling up of projects in ways that were previously considered impossible, where complexity stops being a problem and could become a positive feature. With the emergence of Free Software and Open Source projects and, more specifically, with the Linux kernel project, practitioners and researchers have started to witness how the participation of a huge community in a project could represent a promising direction for the organisation of work. In the Linux kernel, for example, nearly 12,000 developers from more than 1,200 companies have contributed to the project since 2005 (Corbet et al., 2015). These principles and practices have spread also to different domains than software development, showing a promising strategy for organising design, work and management of complex projects (Goetz, 2003). Among the many new definitions created in order to understand better the new phenomena of organisation of work emerged thanks to the digital technologies, peer production has emerged as the explanation and generalisation of these processes. The term was coined by Yochai Benkler, who analysed many cases of collaborative design (intended with a broader definition) through the dimensions of organisation and management and proposed \u201cpeer production\u201d (and especially, \u201ccommons-based peer production\u201d) as a third way for organising work and business beside markets and managerial hierarchies (Benkler, 2002). Benkler generalised from the phenomenon of Free Software to suggest characteristics that make large-scale collaborations in many information production fields sustainable. Central to Benkler\u2019s hypothesis is the claim that human knowledge, experiences and skills are highly variable and distributed: Peer production is important not as a technological innovation, but rather as an innovation on the organisation of work thanks to technology. In peer production, the distributed pool of users\/designers participating in a project can better identify who is the best person for a task, with an improved identification and allocation of human creativity. As defined by Benkler, peer production is, therefore, an organisational innovation along three dimensions (Benkler, 2016):<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Decentralised conception and execution, based on the self-selection of the participants at work on a modular organisation of the project;<\/li>\n
    2. Coexistence of diverse motivations (including non-monetary motivations) allows the participation of a large community of participants and<\/li>\n
    3. The organisation is separated from property and contract, with inputs and outputs mostly governed as open commons (hence, the often-used term of \u201ccommons-based peer production\u201d); the governance of resources and tasks are based on a combination of participatory, meritocratic and charismatic strategies rather than proprietary, contractual and hierarchical models.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      According to Benkler, these characteristics define peer production against other definitions of mass-collaboration (or even mass-competition) phenomena: for example, in Crowdsourcing, the tasks are highly regimented and pre-specified by the project\u2019s management, with the main goal of cost reduction, rather than distributed exploration of resources and possibilities. Peer production has, therefore, been considered a promising framework for understanding and managing large collective intelligence projects. The research on peer production, mostly developed in the field of social sciences and legal studies, has mainly focused on the topics of organisation, motivation and quality (Benkler et al., 2015).<\/p>\n

      As defined by Benkler and many other scholars, peer production is based on information for the self-organisation of participants and as the basis of the projects developed: the work is organised thanks to digital tools and data and consists of the collaborative development of modular projects of digital content. Thanks to ICTs, the costs for working (and distributing) digital content have lowered dramatically, making it easier to work on a large scale with digital content. There have been, however, many attempts at defining and experimenting how peer production could be applied to physical products beside only digital content. As noted by Clay Shirky, this could happen because: \u201cAn increasing number of physical products are becoming so data-centric that the physical aspects are simply executional steps at the end of a chain of digital manipulation\u201d (Shirky, 2007). Early attempts at defining peer production for physical goods tried to understand a scenario of a society in which peer production is the primary mode of production, fulfilling the old Marxist postulate that control over the means of production should be in the hands of the producers, more specifically as commons (Siefkes, 2008). The most critical issues considered by Christian Siefkes were the coordination of production with consumption and the allocation of physical resources and goods (which, being rival goods, are limited, cannot be completely shared and are costly to distribute). Here, digital fabrication is already seen as a possible means of supporting these processes by allowing personal manufacturing as proposed by Neil Gershenfeld (2005) but not for completely solving all the issues of peer production for physical goods. Michel Bauwens also reflected on the possibilities for the peer production of physical things, proposing Open Design, Open Manufacturing, Open Money and P2P Energy Grids as its main strategies (Bauwens, 2009). In order to produce physical goods, there are inevitable costs of getting the capital together, and there needs at least to be cost recovery in order to make a project sustainable, therefore peer production as it emerged in digital content cannot be completely adopted. However, Bauwens suggested that the design process is the link between peer production and physical goods, since it is now largely an immaterial software-based process depending on the collaboration of several people. Therefore, a possible strategy could be the link between shared projects (Open Design) that can be prototyped and compiled in Maker Laboratories (Open Manufacturing) or with Open Hardware technologies like the RepRap 3D printer. Open Money and P2P Energy Grids are further elements that improve the sustainability of these issues on the financial and energetic dimensions.<\/p>\n

      Beside a few theoretical contributions about possible scenarios, a relevant amount of contribution has come from the practice of Open Design (Abel et al., 2011) and Open Hardware (Thompson, 2008) projects, where the first physical goods projects were designed and manufactured, facing many organisational, legal and business issues. Research on early Open Design projects (Raasch et al., 2009) showed it to be implemented in a substantial variety of projects with three different loci of production (external manufacturers, community or the focal organisation coordinating the project). In some cases that were examined, there is no clear-cut separation between design, prototyping and production in the community. Furthermore, it is important to point out that the researchers found some limitations to openness of the projects caused by the attempt to balance the interests of the designer community and commercial companies involved, like suppliers or manufacturers. Balka et al. (2009) found strong relationships between the stage of advancement of the development of Open Design projects and the size of the community, the presence of commercial contributors and the intensity of cooperation. However, the research reports that the number of people involved in the analysed communities mostly falls in the 2-10 range, with the range of 11-100 coming in second place, the range of only 1 participant in third place. The range of more than 100 participants is the last place, showing how peer production with physical goods was still limited to a few participants, compared to how its application to digital content was mostly considered relevant for the ability to scale to thousands of participants.<\/p>\n

      Open Design and Open Hardware are, therefore, the projects where peer production is applied to the design and manufacturing of physical goods, and their popularity, number of cases, dimension of communities and relevance have evolved considerably after these first analyses. It has been suggested that if Open Design and Open Hardware can be metaphorically compared to the \u201cbooks\u201d of commons-based peer production, then Maker laboratories are its libraries, that act as common points of access to stored knowledge and where new knowledge can be produced by providing general access to the tools, methods and experience of peer production (Troxler, 2011). Furthermore some of these spaces, especially Fab Labs, not only provide local access to digital and traditional manufacturing technologies, but also require the users to share their knowledge (CBA, 2012). Some research, however, has shown how the sharing of projects and documentation is still limited: an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with Fab Lab users found that the sharing of documentation and projects is limited by the difficulty of the task (especially when it involves tacit knowledge) and at the same time by the continuous evolution of the global Fab Lab community. Interestingly, these motivations are not the same for global online platforms, identified by researchers in previous literature (Wolf et al., 2014).<\/p>\n

      If Maker Laboratories are libraries for the peer production of physical goods, then the readers who come to these libraries are widely regarded to be the Makers. The term \u201cMaker\u201d has been generally referred to people who autonomously engage in the design and production of physical goods, from craft to electronics. Chris Anderson (Anderson, 2012) extends this definition stating that, furthermore, they use digital desktop tools to design and prototype new products; they follow cultural norms that prescribe to share and collaborate on those designs in online communities; they use common design standards that could enable the manufacturing of these projects by many actors and organisations beside the original designers or manufacturers. An empirical study of the development of the Maker identity shared by members of a small-town Hackerspace discovered that the identity of an established Maker is based on the development of a tool and material sensibility, on the adoption of an ad-hoci attitude and on the engagement with the broader Maker community (Toombs et al., 2014). Makers are generally considered a new kind of work that could generate new business and employment, with new dynamics, technologies and markets (Anderson, 2010, 2012; Hatch, 2014). The emergence of Makers is, however, still recent: the birth of the term is generally considered to be in 2005 with the launch of Make Magazine (Dougherty, 2005), and there is still a gap in the literature regarding the working conditions of being a Maker. The link between peer production and physical goods has been, therefore, established in practice thanks to Open Hardware and Open Design projects, developed and manufactured in Maker laboratories by Makers. The research on this topic is, however, still in its early steps, and while many contributions point to limits and differences in the peer production of physical goods, compared to digital content, more focus is needed on the organisation and the working conditions of such an approach.<\/p>\n

      Makers’ Inquiry: A national investigation about a new condition in Italy<\/h2>\n

      The term \u201cMaker\u201d and the whole global ecosystem of Maker laboratories are recent phenomena and this aspect is even more relevant in Italy, where the first (temporary) Fab Lab was established in 2011, several years after many other countries had one (Menichinelli and Ranellucci, 2015). In order to explore the social, economic, cultural and technological dimensions of Makers in Italy, we set up the Makers\u2019 Inquiry as an online survey developed during 2014. The Makers\u2019 Inquiry<\/a> was developed and coordinated by the Department of Design of Politecnico di Milano, in collaboration with the Make in Italy CBD Foundation<\/a> and the Make in Italy Association<\/a>; it was also supported by the DESIS Network<\/a>.
      \nThe survey analysed Italian Makers in terms of which skills and capabilities they have, what kind of places they work in, which design processes and approaches they follow and what their social and economic statuses are, together with their working conditions. There are several different interpretations of the term \u201cMaker\u201d, and it is still difficult to know precisely how many Makers are in Italy and where they are (and, therefore, it is also difficult to reach them). For this reason, we decided to develop an open online survey in order to explore the emerging community of Italian Makers, rather than trying to precisely identify and quantify who they are. We provided three different meanings to the term Maker, from which participants could choose at the beginning of the survey:<\/p>\n