Applying the word “commons” to online communities is often so novel that no one ever gets to a second-tier issue: how exactly do online commons differ in organization and management from each other? I think it is important to understand that just as “the market” is not a monolithic system (the word describes everything from hardware stories to commodities futures to lemonade stands), so the commons has lots of variations and companion models.
The actual varieties of commons are often overlooked because the commons is a fairly new concept in contemporary economics and social analysis. There has been very little theoretical work to differentiate how wikis, open source software, community trusts and dozens of other forms of peer production are organized and managed technically, socially and politically. So here is a provocative gambit: Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation has prepared an excellent wiki page that sets forth a rough taxonomy of different forms of “non-coercive methods of governance” in peer production. In a blog post today, “The Different Aspects of Peer Governance,” Bauwens writes:
I think it is important to distinguish the peer governance of specific distributed networks and communities, i.e. of peer producing communities, which are often plural monocultures, from the governance of the political sphere as a whole, which is a decentralized, and not distributed, network with competing power centers. Here, we will not have the pure peer governance models, but rather peer-inspired models, such as multistakeholdership-based models of governance.
Bauwens proposes four main categories of peer governance:
1. The forms of peer governance of open/free communities and peer production groups
2. The forms of governance/ownership/income distribution for the derived and monetizable service and market-oriented production models that derive from commons-related projects
3. The forms of management that can be used
4. Political governance models for the whole of society that are inspired by peer to peer models or principles
Identifying key genres of peer production and how they differ from one another is likely to be a long and complicated project subject to much debate and revision — especially since Internet-based innovation moves so quickly. But Bauwens’ attempt to develop a more formal and granular understanding of online commons is an important step. Incidentally, the P2P Foundation blog is a consistently good source of thinking and speculation about peer production. Highly recommended.
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