Knowledge and the Commons: Peer Production and Netocracies in the era of the Commons
Workshop organized by Natalia Avlona Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP) as defined and described by Benkler in his two seminal works, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the nature of the Firm” (2002) and the “Wealth of the Networks” (2006), constitutes a new paradigm for the production of immaterial artefacts and the organization of work in general. Under such a paradigm, many of the assumptions regarding property or classical forms of organization such as the hierarchy or the market collapse and new forms of organization of work as well as forms of managing property emerge. Free/ Open Source Software (FOSS) is an archetypical form of legally, technically and organizationally structuring such work (Stallman, 1996, 2010), as well as Wikipedia, which is the archetypical form of free/ open content production. All such forms of production are based on a complex technical, legal and normative set of rules (Lessig, 2006) that allow the contribution to the Commons, without the classic problems of Commons exhaustion that we see in tangible goods (Hardin, 1968). On the contrary, in an environment of digital or intangible artefacts, we are mostly concerned with the inverse problem of the tragedy of the anti-commons (Heller, 1998), which describes the underutilization of a privately owned resource as a result of the lack of access. Such conditions become increasingly relevant today, where the boundaries between digital and physical gradually blur and create hybrid physical and digital places, where production of physical artefacts may be organized following many of the principle of digital production and the Commons. In such a “phigital” (physical-digital hybrid) environment, it is not the materiality of the artefact that makes the difference, but rather the knowledge capacity it incorporates. The Commons in a sense reinforce a more traditional understanding of knowledge production as a collective enterprise rather than the romantic stereotype of the isolated genius. But in another sense, precisely because of the radical alteration of the mechanisms of its production that it entails, the Commons radically change the condition of knowledge workers. This appears very clearly in Commonwealth, the third part of the trilogy of Hardt and Negri (2009), where the conditions and implications of immaterial labour are analysed and explored. All the above sets the canvas for the broader discussion of the nature of knowledge production, organisation, dissemination and exploitation. It is frequently described as a struggle between the Common-ists and the Net-ocrats and is explored in detail in Bauwens’s work (2014). It is a struggle between the information commons and big-data monopolies that also influences our understanding of knowledge production, the knowledge worker and the socio-legal and technological institutions supporting a world dominated by immaterial labour. Indicative Bibliography: Benkler, Yochai (2002) Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm. The Yale Law Journal 112(3): 429 Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-11056-1. Hardt Michael and Negri Antonio (2009), Commonwealth, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,. ISBN 978-0-674-03511-9 Heller, Michael (January 1998). "The Tragedy of the Anticommons". Harvard Law Review. Lessig, Larry (2006) Code: Version 2.0 ISBN 978-0-465-03914-2 Rose, Carol M. (1986). "The Comedy of the Commons: Commerce, Custom, and Inherently Public Property". Faculty Scholarship Series: Paper 1828. Retrieved December 28, 2011. Stallman, R (Spring 1996) Reevaluating Copyright: The Public Must Prevail, from the Oregon Law Review Stallman, Richard M (2010). Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Second ed.). Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. ISBN 978-0-9831592-0-9.
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Keynote Speaker
Call for papers This call invites papers covering the following areas:
Abstracts should be sent before May 1st, 2015 to:
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