New subject: CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production

8 Jun 2015

Hi Aaron

Thanks for your comment. Of course, you are right - I should have phrased this better as
in "I have not seen many analysis of the weight given to wiki-volunteer work in the
context of broader paid work, or to the issues related to the presence of paid workers in
wiki-volunteer projects". I could be wrong, particularly in the latter case, but an
admittedly quick perusal of the first couple of pages of search results which you provided
below would seem to indicate that researchers typically focus on how volunteers work
cooperatively-communally in WP, rather than on how wiki-work fits into the broader
political economy (i.e. wages) or how the broader political economy affects WP?

cheers,

Mathieu

________________________________________

Today's Topics:

   1. CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer     production
      (Mathieu ONeil)
   2. Re: CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
      (Aaron Halfaker)

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Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 12:12:34 +0000
From: Mathieu ONeil &lt;mathieu.oneil(a)anu.edu.au&gt;
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Subject: [Wiki-research-l] CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and
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Hi all

I have not seen many studies of labour / work in the WP-WM context so I thought this may
be of interest to some?

cheers

Mathieu

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

<apologies if you receive this message more than once>

CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
Editors: Phoebe Moore (Middlesex University London), Mathieu O’Neil (University of
Canberra), Stefano Zacchiroli (University Paris Diderot)

The rise in the usage and delivery capacity of the Internet in the 1990s has led to the
development of massively distributed online projects where self-governing volunteers
collaboratively produce public goods. Notable examples include Free and Open Source
Software (FOSS) projects such as Debian and GNOME, as well as the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
These distributed practices have been characterised as peer production, crowdsourcing,
mass customization, social production, co-configurative work, playbour, user-generated
content, wikinomics, open innovation, participatory culture, produsage, and the wisdom of
the crowd, amongst other terms. In peer production, labour is communal and outputs are
orientated towards the further expansion of the commons, an ecology of production that
aims to defy and resist the hierarchies and rules of ownership that drive productive
models within capitalism (Moore, 2011); while the commons, recursively, are the chief
resource in this mode of production (Söderberg & O’Neil, 2014).

Peer projects are ‘ethical’ as participation is primarily motivated by self-fulfillment
and validated by a community of peers, rather than by earning wages. Their governance is
‘modular’, understood in a design sense (decomposable blocks sharing a common interface),
but also in political-economy terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and control
by individually socializing their works into commons. Conflicting interpretations of their
societal impact have been articulated (O’Neil, 2015). Skeptics view the abjuration of
exclusive property rights over the goods they produce as irrelevant, and ethical-modular
projects as increasing worker exploitation: participants’ passionate labour occurs at the
expense of less fortunate others, who do not have the disposable income, cultural capital,
or family support to engage in unpaid labour (Moore & Taylor, 2009; Huws, 2013). In
contrast, reformists, often hailing from a management perspective, suggest that the
co-optation of communal labour by firms will improve business practices and society
(Arvidsson, 2008; Demil et al., 2015). Finally activists celebrate the abjuration of
exclusive property rights, and present ethical-modular projects as key actors in a
historical process leading to the supersession of capitalism and hierarchy (Kostakis &
Bauwens, 2014).

This last perspective raises a central challenge, which is the avoidance of purely utopian
thinking. In other words, how can commons-based peer production reach deeply into daily
life? How can ‘already existing non-capitalist economic processes’ be strengthened, ‘new
non-capitalist enterprises’ be built, and ‘communal subjects’ be established
(Gibson-Graham, 2003: 157)? An increasingly large free public goods and services sector
could well cohabit in a plural economy with employment in cooperatives, paid independent
work, and the wage-earning of the commercial sector. However analysis of peer production
typically eschews mundane considerations such as living wages, benefits, job security,
working conditions, work-induced medical conditions, and debates on labour organization.
How can peer production operate as a sustainable practice enabling people to live, if
labour and work issues are not formally addressed?

To advance this agenda, the tenth issue of the Journal of Peer Production, titled Peer
Production and Work, calls for papers in two linked areas:

*Peer production in a paid work society*
Nowadays firms attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic example is
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as ‘Turkers’, ‘cloud workers’ or
‘click workers’) who accomplish micro-tasks such as tagging and labeling images,
transcribing audio or video recordings, and categorizing products. This extreme
modularization of work results in their status being that of independent contractors
rather than employees with rights, necessitating novel means of protection and redress
(Irani & Silberman, 2013). The so-called 'sharing economy' also uses peer
production methods, such as the self-selection of modular and granular tasks, to extract
ever-more value from the labour of volunteer ‘prosumers’ (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015).
Capitalist firms are also increasingly engaging with ethical-modular organizations, in
some cases paying wages to participants. Such labour is thus both ‘alienated’, or sold,
and ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to produce commons. Do traditional categories
such as exploitation and alienation still apply?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Peer production and the global political economy
- Peer production and the rise of precarious work
- Peer workers and possibilities for worker organisation
- Does the autonomy of peer workers cause conflict in firms, and how is it resolved?
- What strategies do firms adopt to co-opt peer production (e.g., ‘hackhathons’)?
- Do tensions around property rights emerge?
- Subjectivity in peer production
- Peer production and intellectual property, coded work

*Paid work in peer production projects*
How does paid labour affect ethical P2P projects? Mansell and Berdou (2010) argue that
firms supporting the work of programmers who contribute to volunteer projects, to the
commons, will not affect the ‘cooperative spirit’ of projects; nor can this support
prevent the results of labour from being socialized into commons. Is this always the
case?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- How do peer projects deal with the presence of paid or waged labour?
- Is this topic discussed within peer production projects? In what way?
- What benefits do paid or waged workers enjoy in peer projects?
- How does paid labour affect peer production projects?

*Timeline*
300-500 word-abstract due: 30 July 2015
Notification to authors: 30 August 2015
Submission of full paper: 31 December 2015
Reviews to authors: 15 February 2016
Revised papers: 30 April 2016
Signals due: 30 May 2016
Issue release: June/July 2016

*Submission guidelines*
Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by July 30, 2015 and should be sent to
&lt;work(a)peerproduction.net&gt;et>. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to
Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/
Full papers and materials are due December 31, 2015 for review.
Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words; personal testimonies or ‘tales of toil’
in the Processed World tradition should be up to 4,000 words.

*References*
Arvidsson, A. (2008). The ethical economy of consumer coproduction. Journal of
Macromarketing, 8, 326-338.

Demil, B., Lecoq. X. & Warnier, E. (2015). The capabilities of bazaar governance:
Investigating the advantage of business models based on open communities. Journal of
Organizational Change Management, in press.

Frayssé, O. & O’Neil, M. (2015) Digital labour and prosumer capitalism: The US matrix.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and class. Critical
Sociology, 29, 123-164.

Huws, U. (2013). The underpinnings of class in the digital age: Living, labour and value.
Socialist Register, 50, 80-107.

Irani, L. & Silberman, M. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in
Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems.

Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2014) Network society and future scenarios for a
collaborative economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Mansell, R. & Berdou, E. (2010). Political economy, the internet and FL/OSS
development. In Hunsinger, J., Allen, M. & Klastrup, L. (Eds.) International handbook
of Internet research (pp. 341-362). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Springer.

Moore, P. (2011). Subjectivity in the ecologies of P2P Production. The Journal of
Fibreculture FCJ-119. Online.

Moore, P. & Taylor, P. A. (2009). Exploitation of the self in community-based software
production: Workers’ freedoms or firm foundations? Capital & Class, 99-117.

O’Neil, M. (2015). Labour out of control: The political economy of capitalist and ethical
organizations. Organization Studies, 1-21.

Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). 'Introduction'. Book of Peer Production
(pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 08:46:34 -0500
From: Aaron Halfaker &lt;ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
        &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work
        and peer        production
Message-ID:
        &lt;CAKP=3WxSPzS5ZRUgwKLO_4Uf7D7H1mv-ozxMv6S7_JCzQc9F8Q(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;
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...

 I have not seen many studies of labour / work in the WP-WM context 

Genuinely curious:  Would the ~25-50 papers per year studying work
practices in Wikipedia/Wikimedia published in ACM human-computer
interaction spaces each year not meet the definition?

E.g.

   -

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=wikipedia+work&btnG=&hl=en&…
   -

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=wikipedia+labor&btnG=&hl=en&am…

-Aaron

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Mathieu ONeil &lt;mathieu.oneil(a)anu.edu.au&gt;
wrote:

...
  Hi all

 I have not seen many studies of labour / work in the WP-WM context so I
 thought this may be of interest to some?

 cheers

 Mathieu

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 <apologies if you receive this message more than once>

 CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
 Editors: Phoebe Moore (Middlesex University London), Mathieu O’Neil
 (University of Canberra), Stefano Zacchiroli (University Paris Diderot)

 The rise in the usage and delivery capacity of the Internet in the 1990s
 has led to the development of massively distributed online projects where
 self-governing volunteers collaboratively produce public goods. Notable
 examples include Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects such as
 Debian and GNOME, as well as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. These distributed
 practices have been characterised as peer production, crowdsourcing, mass
 customization, social production, co-configurative work, playbour,
 user-generated content, wikinomics, open innovation, participatory culture,
 produsage, and the wisdom of the crowd, amongst other terms. In peer
 production, labour is communal and outputs are orientated towards the
 further expansion of the commons, an ecology of production that aims to
 defy and resist the hierarchies and rules of ownership that drive
 productive models within capitalism (Moore, 2011); while the commons,
 recursively, are the chief resource in this mode of production (Söderberg &
 O’Neil, 2014).

 Peer projects are ‘ethical’ as participation is primarily motivated by
 self-fulfillment and validated by a community of peers, rather than by
 earning wages. Their governance is ‘modular’, understood in a design sense
 (decomposable blocks sharing a common interface), but also in
 political-economy terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and
 control by individually socializing their works into commons. Conflicting
 interpretations of their societal impact have been articulated (O’Neil,
 2015). Skeptics view the abjuration of exclusive property rights over the
 goods they produce as irrelevant, and ethical-modular projects as
 increasing worker exploitation: participants’ passionate labour occurs at
 the expense of less fortunate others, who do not have the disposable
 income, cultural capital, or family support to engage in unpaid labour
 (Moore & Taylor, 2009; Huws, 2013). In contrast, reformists, often hailing
 from a management perspective, suggest that the co-optation of communal
 labour by firms will improve business practices and society (Arvidsson,
 2008; Demil et al., 2015). Finally activists celebrate the abjuration of
 exclusive property rights, and present ethical-modular projects as key
 actors in a historical process leading to the supersession of capitalism
 and hierarchy (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014).

 This last perspective raises a central challenge, which is the avoidance
 of purely utopian thinking. In other words, how can commons-based peer
 production reach deeply into daily life? How can ‘already existing
 non-capitalist economic processes’ be strengthened, ‘new non-capitalist
 enterprises’ be built, and ‘communal subjects’ be established
 (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 157)? An increasingly large free public goods and
 services sector could well cohabit in a plural economy with employment in
 cooperatives, paid independent work, and the wage-earning of the commercial
 sector. However analysis of peer production typically eschews mundane
 considerations such as living wages, benefits, job security, working
 conditions, work-induced medical conditions, and debates on labour
 organization. How can peer production operate as a sustainable practice
 enabling people to live, if labour and work issues are not formally
 addressed?

 To advance this agenda, the tenth issue of the Journal of Peer Production,
 titled Peer Production and Work, calls for papers in two linked areas:

 *Peer production in a paid work society*
 Nowadays firms attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic
 example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as
 ‘Turkers’, ‘cloud workers’ or ‘click workers’) who accomplish micro-tasks
 such as tagging and labeling images, transcribing audio or video
 recordings, and categorizing products. This extreme modularization of work
 results in their status being that of independent contractors rather than
 employees with rights, necessitating novel means of protection and redress
 (Irani & Silberman, 2013). The so-called 'sharing economy' also uses peer
 production methods, such as the self-selection of modular and granular
 tasks, to extract ever-more value from the labour of volunteer ‘prosumers’
 (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015). Capitalist firms are also increasingly engaging
 with ethical-modular organizations, in some cases paying wages to
 participants. Such labour is thus both ‘alienated’, or sold, and
 ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to produce commons. Do traditional
 categories such as exploitation and alienation still apply?
 Topics may include, but are not limited to:
 - Peer production and the global political economy
 - Peer production and the rise of precarious work
 - Peer workers and possibilities for worker organisation
 - Does the autonomy of peer workers cause conflict in firms, and how is it
 resolved?
 - What strategies do firms adopt to co-opt peer production (e.g.,
 ‘hackhathons’)?
 - Do tensions around property rights emerge?
 - Subjectivity in peer production
 - Peer production and intellectual property, coded work

 *Paid work in peer production projects*
 How does paid labour affect ethical P2P projects? Mansell and Berdou
 (2010) argue that firms supporting the work of programmers who contribute
 to volunteer projects, to the commons, will not affect the ‘cooperative
 spirit’ of projects; nor can this support prevent the results of labour
 from being socialized into commons. Is this always the case?
 Topics may include, but are not limited to:
 - How do peer projects deal with the presence of paid or waged labour?
 - Is this topic discussed within peer production projects? In what way?
 - What benefits do paid or waged workers enjoy in peer projects?
 - How does paid labour affect peer production projects?

 *Timeline*
 300-500 word-abstract due: 30 July 2015
 Notification to authors: 30 August 2015
 Submission of full paper: 31 December 2015
 Reviews to authors: 15 February 2016
 Revised papers: 30 April 2016
 Signals due: 30 May 2016
 Issue release: June/July 2016

 *Submission guidelines*
 Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by July 30, 2015 and should
 be sent to &lt;work(a)peerproduction.net&gt;et>. All peer reviewed papers will be
 reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See
 http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/
 Full papers and materials are due December 31, 2015 for review.
 Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words; personal testimonies or
 ‘tales of toil’ in the Processed World tradition should be up to 4,000
 words.

 *References*
 Arvidsson, A. (2008). The ethical economy of consumer coproduction.
 Journal of Macromarketing, 8, 326-338.

 Demil, B., Lecoq. X. & Warnier, E. (2015). The capabilities of bazaar
 governance: Investigating the advantage of business models based on open
 communities. Journal of Organizational Change Management, in press.

 Frayssé, O. & O’Neil, M. (2015) Digital labour and prosumer capitalism:
 The US matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press.

 Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and
 class. Critical Sociology, 29, 123-164.

 Huws, U. (2013). The underpinnings of class in the digital age: Living,
 labour and value. Socialist Register, 50, 80-107.

 Irani, L. & Silberman, M. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker
 invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI
 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

 Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2014) Network society and future scenarios for
 a collaborative economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

 Mansell, R. & Berdou, E. (2010). Political economy, the internet and
 FL/OSS development. In Hunsinger, J., Allen, M. & Klastrup, L. (Eds.)
 International handbook of Internet research (pp. 341-362). Amsterdam, The
 Netherlands: Springer.

 Moore, P. (2011). Subjectivity in the ecologies of P2P Production. The
 Journal of Fibreculture FCJ-119. Online.

 Moore, P. & Taylor, P. A. (2009). Exploitation of the self in
 community-based software production: Workers’ freedoms or firm foundations?
 Capital & Class, 99-117.

 O’Neil, M. (2015). Labour out of control: The political economy of
 capitalist and ethical organizations. Organization Studies, 1-21.

 Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). 'Introduction'. Book of Peer Production
 (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production