Metaphors and analogies are always somewhat dangerous: can the governance of a distributed system be compared to a system based on the hierarchical allocation of resources?

Here is an old item from Joi Ito’s blog , by Vinay Gupta, one of the pioneers of the open design movement.

I’m reposting it because it is an important thoughtcapsule about peer governance, and its darker aspects:

Joi Ito:

“I’d like to outline a scenario which makes this visible: suppose a personal grudge of epic proportions grows between the head of an open source project and one of the core developers, and the head simply begins to reject all patches which that the developer works on, essentially barring the developer from further participation in the project.

What recourse does the developer, or the community, have?

* The Developer can simply leave. This is effectively exile: being deprived of participation in something one has invested in is bad. No recourse or resolution has take place (bad)

* The Community can pressure the Head and/or the Developer into behaving reasonably, solving their differences, burying the hatchet, and getting back to work. (good – this is probably the sort of behavior we’d hope to see more often in an emergent-type society)

* The Developer can fork the project and attempt to pull enough support from the Community to make the fork viable, perhaps even displacing the original project.

Now, I’d like to suggest that these three options: exile, social resolution or “civil war” (a code fork being, in some circumstances, as close to a civil war as the open source development process allows) are the resolution possibilities which exist in a feudal society.

If the King is being a bastard, in the feudal past, they either put up with it, leave, attempt to rally the Barons into exerting social pressure, or declare a civil war.

I think that this parallelism indicates that, in many instances, governance of open source projects is essentially a highly functional, singularly effective form of feudalism. Feudal structures worked very well for making sure that the land was secure and productive, and the newness of the Internet might be one reason that a feudal structure is so effective at this stage of homesteading the noosphere.

People invented Parliaments and institutions like the House of Lords to constrain the power of a King. Essentially, they set up systems which had multiple leaders at all times, so that checks and balances were always in force, rather than having rival leaders arise in times of crisis, potentially resulting in destructive wars. The notion that the Opposition must always exist and must always be given power to maintain balance strikes me as a crucial part of how democracy evolved: initially the Barons counterbalanced the King, and then the People counterbalanced both the King and the Lords. In a feudal culture, opposition comes from without. In a democracy, opposition comes from within: it has been coopted and integrated to create a more functional whole.”

Indeed, I think we can see some evidence that this kind of feudal squabble occurs in the Blogosphere, and follows some of these paths to resolution. In placing RSS under the control of third parties, Dave Wiener essentially signed the Magna Carta, limiting his own power for the good of the land, in an attempt to head off a Civil War between the Kingdom of RSS and the Rebels of (n)Echo. “

My friend Adam Arviddson is very happy about the increasing uptake of the ethical tool Actics, which a Digg item says “will be as big as Facebook! A social network for individuals and companies to demonstrate and live up to their ethical values.”

The original article by Peter Scholtus at Treehugger gives a good explanation of what the project is about:

“Whether you are a business or an individual, Actics provides you with an ethical reality check and helps you turn your ethical visions into authentic actions. By signing up to this free social network, your corporate values will shine in the spotlight- a type of transparency more and more in demand, no matter what industry you belong to. It also works the other way around for you. If you are the one looking for a restaurant, lawyer or school, you can check out the ones with a high Actics rating and the ethical values important to you.

How does is work? Like with any other social network, you register and define who you are for your profile. Since this one is all about actions and ethics, you get to choose your corporate or personal values and state how you act them out. It is then up to your friends, clients or investors to rate you out of 100 for how true you are to your values. To help you out, they can also send you suggestions and endorse you. A great feature of this software is that a plugin, showing your ethical performance, can be integrated into your website or your company’s intranet if you want to share your results with a bigger network.”

Charles Leadbeater, the author of We Think, and Hilary Cottam, have written an essay, which is also the start of a research project on open healthcare by Demos, on a significant social care experiment in the UK, which puts patients in charge of their care, according to what we would call a Partner State model. The article describes the benefits, but also the difficulties, of making this model work, and should be read in full. Here are two snippets with the essentials.

The Experiment

“In Control run by a social enterprise for the Department of Health which helps young people with learning disabilities take control of their own care. Everyone going on In Control gets their own annual budget – the cash equivalent of what they would have got in services – and help to decide how to spend it on the kind of support they need. Caroline and Joe quickly drew up a plan to get to school on the bus, with the help of two fellow sixth formers who were studying for care qualifications. Joe was happy. He and Caroline were managing the risk rather than the department, so the social workers were content. And as Caroline puts it : “You give me ten pounds and I will make sure it goes much further for Joe than any local authority.”
Joe and Caroline Tomlinson, and the other families enlisted by Wigan council onto the project found their relationship with public services was transformed. Where once they were dissatisfied, complaining consumers, in an adversarial relationship with service providers and professionals, they found themselves turned into participants and co-investors in finding better outcomes for themselves. They sought and paid for professional advice and support, but within the context of their own plans. In the past, all too frequently, it had felt the other way around: Joe and Caroline fitted into plans and strategies drawn up by the professionals, trying to bend their lives to fit within the provision the council made available.”

Preliminary conclusions:

“It is often assumed that the public have to rely on professionals to deliver public services because in the economic jargon there is an information asymmetry: the doctor or teacher knows more than the patient or pupil. Yet the families of these children have fine grained knowledge about what they really need: when they need two carers to support them and when only one will do; what risks to take on a trip out to the zoo and so on. The In Control initiative draws out this latent, tacit knowledge of users that is largely kept dormant and suppressed by the traditional delivery approach to services in which professionals are largely in control, assumed to have all the knowledge and so consumers are largely passive because they are assumed to lack the capability of taking charge of their own care, health, learning or tax.

Caroline Tomlinson summed up the benefits of In Control, this way: “You get longer term funding. Its not week-by-week so you can genuinely plan for how you will use the money. It gives you something to build around – for example planning a trip out that you might save up for – rather than just managing the service, getting by. It gives you much greater flexibility to commission the mix of services you need, when you need them.”

Full essay at www.charlesleadbeater.net/orange-buttons/public-services-2.0.aspx

Robin Good has published an excellent, illustrated, version of an essay on the political implications of peer to peer theory.

Part One is here.

Part Two is here.

In These Times reviews a significant book by Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, the author being the New York Times Magazine’s leading political journalist,

ITT writes that Bai “has written an entertaining narrative that combines serious analysis with an often rollicking mix of humor and political gossip. In doing so, he provides readers with a rare and fascinating inside view into some of the key players in the blogosphere, the leadership of the Democratic Party and the secretive world of the multimillionaires and billionaires who are bankrolling many of the left’s most important organizations.

The author tells us that over the past three years, he “set out across the country to find the places where this nascent [progressive] movement was coalescing and to trace its arc.” He then goes on to explain the significance of the book’s title: “The movement that dominates the next generation of American politics will be the one … that articulates some new and persuasive argument for how we meet the future.”

Bai’s quest to see if anyone or any organization has come up with “the argument” (or as he also characterizes it, “new ideas” and/or “one big idea”), seems to be based on a silver-bullet theory of social change. As such, many readers will find Bai’s near-obsessive search for “the argument” to be a one-dimensional way of analyzing what is a complex, multilayered process.”

Joi Ito posted an interesting report on a new approach to engaging young japanese to go to work.

“Last week I met Mr. Sunagawa from LocationValue Inc. that runs Otetsudai Networks. Otetsudai Networks is a very cool service that is one of these “perfect for Japan” things.

Because of the advanced aging population and the tendency for many of the younger generation to not be in a hurry to lock down full-time jobs, businesses are having an increasingly more difficult time filling posts – so much so that some businesses are having to close down, not because of lack of business, but purely because they can’t staff their stores.

My sister has written about the Japanese youth behavior where less and less stuff is planned – the kids going out and using their mobile devices to meet up or deciding to do things while constantly keeping in touch with each other. These swarming bands of kids are now adults and many of them don’t want to be tied down.

These “kids” are not becoming adults. In a recent survey by Otetsudai Networks, most people surveyed cared more about freedom and flexibility than the pay when considering a part-time job.

Enter Otetsudai Networks. With Otetsudai Networks, if you are willing to work, you sign up for the service with your skills and focus, take a GPS reading on your phone and then just hang out. If you are looking for someone for say… 3 hours to man a cash register or help wash dishes, you just send the request to Otetsudai Networks and within minutes, you have a list of people available. The list shows what each person is qualified for, how others have rated their work and exactly how far away they are. Typically you will receive a list of half a dozen or more people within a few minutes.

The businesses are rated too on a per-manager basis so when you’re hanging out with your friends and you get a request to go help at the corner convenience shop, you know how your peers have rated that particular guy who’s asking you to come and help. You can also counter the request and say you’d go if they paid you 2000 yen / hour instead of 1500.

As more and more people start using this system, it’s liable to start filling a very important gap in the workforce. It’s also a perfect example of a location based, peer-to-peer reputation based, mobile behavior oriented product for an aging society.

The website is otet.jp, but most of the functionality is only available on the phone.

Update from Mr. Sunagawa:

1. The English name of the company is LocationValue Inc.
2. Employer will see only the name of applicants rather than all the
available people around. “…you have a list of people available” may sound
inaccurate.
3. primary URL of our web is otet.jp instead of otetsu.jp although otetsu.jp
would also be redirected to our site.

UPDATE 2: They have about 45,000 users with 1,000 new users per week.
“

(Via  Panarchy “Social Publishing” talks coming up | Panarchy.com)

Fellow P2P Foundation blogger Paul Hartzog will be in the UK in November to talk about the exciting topic of  Social Publishing

Nov 14, de Montfort University, Leicester, U.K.; Institute of Creative Technologies IOCT
Co-presenter: Richard Adler, Michigan State University
“Social Publishing”
This talk will focus on how social publishing at oort-cloud.org came into being, and on some interesting phenomena that have emerged regarding the future of narrative.
www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/Nov 15-16, Trent University, Nottingham, U.K.; The Political Economy of Peer Production
“Social Publishing”
This brief talk will focus on how social publishing might affect the peer-to-peer p2p economy, and on ways in which social publishing can help us to formulate a more general approach to understand the p2p economy.

www.ntu.ac.uk/nbs/

Both myself and Michel Bauwens will also be present at the Poltical Economy of Peer Production workshop.

Paul’s Social Publishing background comes from his experience in helping to found the  www.oort-cloud.org/ collaborative science fiction writing community. If you are a science fiction fan, be sure to check out Oort-Cloud.

Christian Siefkes’ book about peer production in the physical world, is now available in print through this order page.

The book has 156 pages and costs 9.50 EUR; the shipping fee is just 2.50 EUR

At the University of Lund in Sweden we met researcher Jon Bertilsson, who is doing a detailed analysis of peer interaction on forums, specifically related to the interaction of young people with brands.

The 20-page research paper can be downloaded here.

Here is the abstract:

“This paper deals with how young consumers learn the logic and workings of brands and branding by analyzing textual accounts of conversations between young people between 13-20 years old collected on an online forum situated on a Swedish website. The findings indicate that people learn about these consumer cultural phenomenons through an enculturation process involving conformity to norms of brand and consumer authenticity formed in peer interaction, and the reflexive evasion of punishments for breaking those norms. The enculturation process also involves brand story telling that affects the very meaning of brands, giving the consumers authorship over brand meaning, which is why consumers therefore could be regarded as a type of brand managers.”

Marcin Jakubowski’s Open Source Ecology project, which aims to create concretely existing physical Global Villages, but in the context of fully open global design communities, is taking more and more shape. Here below is Marcin’s vision for an organizational strategy.

More info in his dedicated wiki:

The focus of our Global Village Construction program is to deploy small intentional communities that live according to principles of right livelihood. We are considering the ab initio creation of nominally 12 person communities, by networking and marketing this Buy Out at the Bottom (BOAB) package, at a fee of approximately $5k to participants. With 12 people, that is $60k seed infrastructure capital. With integrated skill of the community integrator, plus individual skills, there is a chance of success, in terms of creating a community with unprecedented quality of life. This quality of life is based on efficient operation, plus 100% voluntary lifestyle, based on transcendence of material constraints. When resource constraints become a non-issue through wise choice of technology, skill, and open source knowledge-enabled flexible production systems for self-sufficiency – then freedom and human creativity are unleashed. As such, the community begins to function as a place of freedom – promoting pursuits of a research and development lifestyle dedicated to the benefit of all humanity. The main working assumption – one already expounded by historical leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, E. F. Schumacher, Buckminster Fuller, and many others – is that economic self-sufficiency is the only true route to a happy and prosperous society. Be in charge of producing your needs, and the world will be a better place.

The concept of right Livelihood used here is used in its most radical form. Superficially, right livelihood is described as making a living without hurting others. However, this statement has the general characteristic of holy scripture – all the ‘right principles’ are described, but very few follow them due to human frailty. We must challenge this human weakness, and attempt to create an environment where good life is to be had for all. People may have tried such improvement throughout all times in history. At the least, this proposal is but another attempt. At the very best, it’s an explicit program, which, because of its integrated nature and an attempt to link ancient wisdom with modern technology – has a chance of carrying small, dedicated groups to lives of uncompromising, good work. If replicated successfully, the same program has globally transformative potential.

What is the deeper meaning of right livelihood? It is the basic definition as in the last paragraph – plus the explicit situational details of how that applies to our lives – according to generally accepted priciples of how the world works. The details are many, and would take many pages to describe, so we can detail only the general principles. Right livelihood is about creating life, not death, and truth, not fiction. Thus, we say no to the military industrial complex – which is about war = commerce. If we understand this, then we start to ask how communities can meet their needs without having to take from others. Then, we start to work on replacing global supply chains with increasingly localized ones. In practice, this could be flexible and digital fabrication fueled by open source design. The future is here, we have all the technology to survive and thrive, by educating with truth and bravery, so that many more people become skilled rather than dependent. With independence comes less reliance on ‘Big Brother’ or bureaucracy. Such bureaucracy should be questioned. So should our artificial money system, arms expenditures for securing resources – ongoing colonial expansion that we fund, and a legal system that enforces commerce = war as the status quo.

We have an option to stop feeding invading colonials, from our own empire-building governments to slave goods from China. Structurally, the more self-sufficient we are, the less we have to pay for our own enslavement – through education that dumbs us down to producers in a global workforce – through taxation that funds rich peoples’ wars of commercial expansion – through societal engineering and PR that makes the quest for an honest life dishonorable if we can’t keep up with the Joneses.

The answer is here, in the development of a replicable village infrastructure, that addresses issues of resource conflict, resource use equity, environmental regeneration, economic distribution, and, consequently, legal and financial reform – by advanced self-sufficiency at unprecedentedly small scales. This is a model of societal evolution, based on principles of open source, voluntary, flexible fabrication economies, that start with the infrastructures of our own backyards – at the same time as they engage in global collaboration on similar issues.

The point is that the advanced self-sufficiency at unprecedentedly small scales leads to easy management of survival, a robust working environment, and, therefore, a voluntary lifestyle that may be dedicated to addressing pressing world issues.