Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 100

If openness defines a disposition that aids peer production through conflicts and key decisions, how is such a seemingly counterintuitive attitude justified by opinionated hackers and Wikipedians? What is it that motivates participants to put aside individual differences, and leaders to allow their projects to grow in unexpected ways? In short, the answer is a dedication to a higher purpose, and in some sense a belief that a project ultimately leads a life of its own. Here again the analogy with cultural production can be drawn: successful peer production projects appear to draw on a mix of passion, reflexive contemplation, self‐importance, and charismatic leadership similar to that found in literary, artistic, and journalistic movements. This passion for the integrity of a larger whole can be seen as a unifying theme when considering participation in Wikipedia and open source projects. As O’Neil writes, dedication to a project can be understood as a critique of contemporary alienation:

[P]articipants in these projects seek a feeling of unity between their identities as consumers and producers, between their status as experts and amateurs, between their roles as leaders and followers, between their activities of work and play, and between themselves and their fellow participants in the project – a project which they see, more often than not, as a cause to defend.

(O’Neil, 2011; see also Turner’s (2009) discussion of the psychic wholeness experienced by tech workers at Burning Man)

This seeking of unity is enacted through talk of values, traditions, and identity. For example, any major change in the organizational structure of Wikipedia will undoubtedly be discussed by proponents and opponents in terms of the “purpose” of Wikipedia, making such purpose the object of debate and potentially leading to edits of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (for the most famous example of this, see discussions of the “Spanish fork,” where Spanish Wikipedians led resistance to the display of advertising on Wikipedia: e.g. Tkacz, 2014).

It may sound strange and unscientific to talk about passion in the context of Wikipedia or open source software, but this affective dimension is certainly an important factor. Here again, the analogy with cultural production is instructive: think of how often we talk about the passion or zeal of great artists and journalists. This is very similar to how Wikipedians and open source developers view senior members of their communities. Meanwhile intense feelings of community at open source conferences (Coleman, 2013) can be compared to a similar “sense of community” felt by those in participatory cultural forms such as folk music (Bohlman, 1988).

These comparisons help us to see not only the importance of emotion, but also the specificity of the “moral economy” of peer production. Here, moral economy essentially means the kinds of moral justifications underlying the specific behaviors, decisions, rules, and other forms of social activity that characterize a project. In this light, it is useful to draw here on Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework (Table 5.1) of justificatory regimes or “orders of worth.”

Table 5.1 Boltanski and Thévenot’s “orders of worth” (1999, p. 368).

Source: Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/136843199002003010.

	Inspired	Domestic	Civic	Opinion	Market	Industrial
Mode of evaluation (worth)	Grace, nonconformity, creativeness	Esteem, reputation	Collective interest	Renown	Price	Productivity, efficiency
Format of relevant information	Emotional	Oral, exemplary, anecdotal	Formal, official	Semiotic	Monetary	Measurable: criteria, statistics
Elementary relation	Passion	Trust	Solidarity	Recognition	Exchange	Functional link
Human qualification	Creativity, ingenuity	Authority	Equality	Celebrity	Desire, purchasing power	Professional competency, expertise

In the Table 5.1, the authors outline six “orders of worth,” each of which represents an important source of justifications for specific actions in many different social situations. For example, let’s say a project team at company X is deciding whether their software product should include a particular feature. Arguments will be put forward that appeal to the overarching value of the market – i.e., whether it will be profitable to include the feature (“the market order”). Arguments will also be made for what is most technologically appealing or efficient (“the industrial order”). And there may also be arguments for a kind of civility (“the civic order”), for example in discussion of whether the product will be compatible with open standards or competing products.

When analyzing cultures of peer production, it is important to see the role of the inspirational mode of justification, from the value placed on charisma as a quality of leadership to the emphasis placed on growing or maintaining levels of passion among project members. In my previous research (Stevenson, 2018) I outlined the importance of this moral economy in the historical development of the Perl programming language, a scripting language that was a key technology for the early World Wide Web and far outgrew its humble beginnings as a UNIX tool created for system administrators. Support for Perl and the many volunteer hours spent by developers on increasing its value could be justified in many ways – for a typical Perl developer it could be justified economically (becoming more proficient with Perl increased their job prospects), technologically (through a dedication to producing the best possible software), as well as in a civic mode (contributing to a commons that would benefit everyone). What stands out, though, is where the inspirational mode of justification was drawn upon to smooth over conflicts and provide grounds for consensus and action when this seemed to be most difficult: most notably, in a case where Perl’s grassroots volunteers and a commercial company collaborated on the Windows version of Perl. Perl’s creator Larry Wall had a keen sense of the need for the Perl community to feel inspired, and for a shared sense of Perl evolving organically rather than according to any single person’s or community’s interests. Feeling inspired, volunteers would be willing to devote significant time and energy to a project they felt carried significance beyond meeting particular technological, economic, or even civic needs. Believing that the project was bigger than any single individual’s preferences and should be allowed to evolve in unexpected ways, Perl supporters were more likely to accept when decisions they did not agree with in the first instance were made.

The case of Perl and Larry Wall confirms what O’Neil previously argued in the context of open source software communities and other “online tribes” (O’Neil, 2009). Building on Weber’s (1978) classic categorization of forms of legitimate authority, O’Neil argues that what characterizes the organization of online tribes is the infusion of charismatic authority within what are largely bureaucracies, or organizations defined by rational‐legal authority, though these bureaucracies are more transparent and democratic than the classic type defined by Weber (O’Neil, 2011). (It should be noted that this strange mashup is not limited to peer production, and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) note that increasing appeals to the inspirational mode of justification and charismatic authority are one of the elements of what they call the “new spirit of capitalism.”) Mixing these forms of authority means these tribes appear to have it both ways: on the one hand, a project like Perl preaches inclusivity and has a host of committees, appointed maintainers, project groups and so on, and thus various formal and informal means of ensuring voices are heard; on the other hand, if Perl founder Larry Wall decides to act against the wishes of the majority and implement a particular major change, his charismatic authority will likely ensure support and acceptance. This contradictory stance is epitomized by the common description of open source project maintainers as “benevolent dictators.” As Kreiss et al. (2011) argue, this means that although peer production projects pride themselves on their opposition to “closed” bureaucracies, they in fact introduce other kinds of closure and opacity, potentially bringing about the kinds of inequality they seek to avoid.

This ambiguity of authority is reflected in cultures of peer production. Much discussion will express a distrust of elite power within the organization, often jokingly called “the cabal,” suggesting a secretive group exercising power with impunity. This use of humor can be seen to work through and playfully challenge the competing forms of authority within these projects (Coleman, 2013, p. 122). As individual projects grow and become more established, the limits of charismatic authority are often tested. As a project’s complexity, diversity, and wider significance increases, so will calls for more transparency and democracy. However, even in Wikipedia and established open source projects, the transition to rational‐legal authority and more democratic forms of governance does not mean charismatic authority disappears. As Dafermos (2012) notes in the context of the FreeBSD project transitioning from an informal selection process to democratic elections for its core team members, the significance of charisma remains: “The persuasive authority of core team members is legitimized mainly through the recognition of the authenticity of their technical charisma by committers.”

The importance of the inspirational mode of justification, and thus the value placed on passion and the justification of charismatic authority, is arguably linked to a key issue facing Wikipedia and several open source projects today, namely the prospects of declining participation and (relatedly) increasing pressures on project members that do stay involved. What happens when the inspiration dries up, or when what once felt like a revolutionary product begins to feel routine? In the case of Perl, an instructive moment in this regard occurred in 1999, when Larry Wall and other senior project members saw that the programming language was losing market share, momentum, and key contributors to competing languages. While some supported developing a charter and thus sought to improve Perl’s prospects by transitioning to a more formalized governance structure, Larry Wall and others rejected this idea, arguing that what was needed was to inspire the community again. Wall’s way forward was chosen, and this resulted in the launch of the Perl 6 project, an entirely new language written from scratch. Once again Wall inspired many others to volunteer their time to a large‐scale, visionary collaborative project with him at the helm, however this time the ambition perhaps outgrew the community’s capacity, and Perl 6 remained in development for years, still requiring a great deal of work before it will stand a chance of widespread adoption. The story of Perl 6 and other examples of mixed success or even failure in the world of open source software reveal the tenuousness of peer production, where inspiration is both a boon and a requirement, and thus may work like a double‐edged sword.