Commons-Based Peer Production

Eben Moglen sieht mit der Freien Software das Ende des »geistigen Eigentums« heraufdämmern. Digital repräsentierbare Informationen widersetzen sich der Eigentumsform, weil sie frei kopierbar sind. Deshalb sieht Moglen in diesem »anarchistischen« Ansatz, bei dem jeder die Werke anderer nicht nur nutzen, sondern auch verbessern darf, die einzig angemessene Produktionsweise – allerdings nur für Informationsgüter. Yochai Benkler verallgemeinert den Ansatz zur »commons-based peer production« und identifiziert das zugrunde liegende, sehr alte gesellschaftliche Organisationsprinzip: die Commons. Jeremy Rifkin will nichts von einer Begrenzung auf die Informationssphäre wissen, sondern sagt den »kollaborativen Commons« eine große Zukunft voraus, in der sie den Kapitalismus Schritt für Schritt zurückdrängen, bis er in einer »hybriden Wirtschaft« nur noch eine untergeordnete Rolle spielt. Doch Benkler wie Rifkin gehen von einer problematischen Konzeption von »Grenzkosten« aus, die ihre Ergebnisse verzerrt. Warum die Commons trotzdem als Hoffnungsträger gelten können, wird in diesem Text gezeigt.

Peer production is a mode of commons-based and – ideally – commons-oriented production in which participation is voluntary and predicated on the self-selection of tasks. This decentralised organisational model, which does not rely on exclusive ownership and formal contracts, has in some cases surpassed traditional forms of production. Originally the Internet enabled millions of people to collectively produce and revise computer operating systems and applications, encyclopedia articles, and film and television databases. Today peer production is still associated to the digital commons in the case of wireless networks and online currencies, but also encompasses offline ventures such as shared machine shops and biohacking, amongst many others.
The Handbook of Peer Production outlines central concepts, examines current and emerging areas of application, and analyses the forms and principles of cooperation that continue to impact multiple areas of production and sociality. Featuring thirty chapters by an international and diverse team of experts in the field, this landmark work maps the origins and manifestations of peer production, discusses the factors and conditions that are enabling and co-opting it, and considers peer production projects’ current impacts and potential consequences for the social order. Detailed chapters address the governance, political economy, and cultures of peer production, as well as user motivations, social rules and norms, the role of peer production in social change and activism, and much more. Filling a gap in available literature as the only extensive overview of peer production’s modes of generating informational goods and services, this ground-breaking volume:
• Offers accessible, up-to-date information to both specialists and non-specialists across academia, industry, journalism, and public advocacy;
• Includes interviews with leading practitioners discussing the future of peer production;
• Critically assesses the histories, key debates, contradictions, and pioneers of peer production;
• Explores technologies for peer production, openness and licensing, peer learning, open design, and free and open-source software.
The Handbook of Peer Production is an indispensable resource for students, instructors, researchers, and professionals working in fields such as communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, and management studies, as well as those interested in the network information economy, the public domain, and new forms of organisation and networking.

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Follow The Handbook of Peer Production on Twitter: @beyourownpeer
More information is available here: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Handbook+of+Peer+Production-p-9781119537106

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Table of Contents
Part I – Introduction
Chapter 01 – The Duality of Peer Production: Infrastructure for the Digital Commons, Free Labor for Free-Riding Firms (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)

Part II – Concepts: Explaining Peer Production
Chapter 02 – Grammar of Peer Production (Vasilis Kostakis & Michel Bauwens)
Chapter 03 – Political Economy of Peer Production (Benjamin Birkinbine)
Chapter 04 – Social Norms and Rules of Peer Production (Christian Pentzold)
Chapter 05 – Cultures of Peer Production (Michael Stevenson)
Chapter 06 (reprint) – Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue (Yochai Benkler & Helen Nissenbaum)

Part III – Conditions: Enabling Peer Production
Chapter 07 – Prophets and Advocates (George Dafermos)
Chapter 08 – Virtue, Efficiency, and the Sharing Economy (Margie Borschke)
Chapter 09 – Openness and Licensing (Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay)
Chapter 10 – User Motivations in Peer Production (Sebastian Spaeth & Sven Niederhöfer)
Chapter 11 – Governing for Growth in Scope: Cultivating a Dynamic Understanding of How Peer Production Collectives Evolve (Rebecca Karp, Amisha Miller & Siobhan O’Mahony)

Part IV – Cases: Realizing Peer Production
Chapter 12 – Free & Open Source Software (Stéphane Couture)
Chapter 13 – Wikipedia and Wikis (Jutta Haider & Olof Sundin)
Chapter 14 – Hacker Cartography: Participatory Mapmaking and Technological Power (Adam Fish)
Chapter 15 – Peer Learning (Panayotis Antoniadis & Alekos Pantazis)
Chapter 16 – Biohacking (Morgan Meyer)
Chapter 17 – Makers (Yana Boeva & Peter Troxler)
Chapter 18 – Blockchain (Pablo Velasco Gonzáles & Nate Tkacz)
Chapter 19 – Wireless Community Networks (Gwen Shaffer)
Chapter 20 – Urban Commons (Nicholas Anastapoulos)

Part V – Conflicts: Peer Production and the World
Chapter 21 – Peer Production and Social Change (Mathieu O’Neil & Sébastien Broca)
Chapter 22 – Peer Production and Collective Action (Stefania Milan)
Chapter 23 – Feminist Peer Production (Sophie Toupin)
Chapter 24 – Postcolonial Peer Production (Maitrayee Deka)
Chapter 25 – Gaps in Peer Design (Francesca Musiani)
Chapter 26 – Makerspaces and Peer Production: Spaces of Possibility, Tension, Post-Automation, or Liberation? (Kat Braybrooke & Adrian Smith)
Chapter 27 – Peer Production and State Theory: Envisioning a Cooperative Partner State (Alex Pazaitis & Wolfgang Drechsler)

Part VI – Conversions: Advancing Peer Production
Chapter 28 – Making a Case for Peer Production: Interviews with Peter Bloom (Rhizomatica), Mariam Mecky (HarassMap), Ory Okolloh (Ushahidi), Abraham Taherivand (Wikimedia Deutschland) & Stefano Zacchiroli (Debian)
Chapter 29 – What’s Next? Peer Production Studies? (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)
Chapter 30 – Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons (Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin & Christian Pentzold)

The Arts and Crafts Movement of late 19th century England professed to democratize art and the production wares. The most prominent character of the Movement was poet, craftsman and socialist William Morris. I claim that today open source philosophy and peer production combined with 3D printing technology represents a similar philosophy about the democratization of production as the 19th century Arts and Crafts Movement. 3D printing is a nascent technology which allows the physical rendering (prototyping) of computer models. As The Arts and Crafts Movement was opposed to machines, I try to ascertain to what extent the Movement’s opposition toward the machine extends and what it is based on. Therefore, I discuss the machine’s two-sided role as, on the one hand, the destroyer of art, and on the other hand, the saviour of art.

The Arts and Crafts Movement and 3D printing along with its related philosophies are connected by their endeavour to make the production of wares more accessible to ordinary people. They also share ideas about co-operative work, the strive for quality instead of profits, and a kind of socialism. In the upcoming future, if current trends persist, it is foreseeable that progress toward an Arts and Crafts vision of society will take place. The concepts of art, handcraft and machine work have been, and still are, in a state of constant change. This entails that other related concepts will change, too, such as the concepts of authenticity and uniqueness, which are definitive concepts of the era of handmaking, and they will begin to denominate new, contemporarily more relevant phenomena. My discussion of Lewis Mumford’s concepts (Megamachine, polytechnics, monotechnics) details that the role of the machine as the destroyer or the saviour of art is contingent on the ideology of the man who wields power over the machine. In this light the Movement’s opposition toward the machine appears more as opposition toward the prevailing capitalist system rather than as simple Luddism.

I study the Arts and Crafts Movement through the texts of its members paying special attention to the writings of its father character William Morris. As 3D printing is still an emerging field of technology my study material, aside from academic articles, also includes news articles, popular literature, lectures and interviews that I have conducted myself. Study material on peer production and open source is based on academic literature. This thesis falls under cultural criticism in which I apply comparative analysis.

This paper analyses the main fault lines of the industrial food system and the consequences of the absolute commodification of food. Then, using the food regime theory and exploring the developments in the industrial food system (mainstream) and the urban alternative food networks (AFNs) and rural food sovereignty movement (innovative niches), the author proposes a transition pathway (the re-commonification of food) towards a food commons regime in which primacy rests in its feature as human beings’ absolute need and the different dimensions of food are properly valued, in opposition to the corporate mono-dimensional valuation of food as a commodity. In order to crowdsource this transition, this paper argues the food sovereignty movement and the AFNs need to grow together, beyond individual organisations, to knit a different and bigger food web capable of confronting the industrial food system for the common good. This ongoing transition that will span decades is to be steered by a tricentric governance system (urban and rural civic collective actions for food, partner states and social private enterprises) that enables access and promote food in all its dimensions through a multiplicity of open structures and sustainable peer-to-peer practices aimed at sharing, co-producing and trading food and knowledge. Unlike the market, the food commons are about cooperation, sharing, stewardship, equity, self-production, sustainability, collectiveness, embeddedness and direct democracy from local to global. Shifting the dominant discourse from the private sphere to the commons arena will open up a whole new world of economic, political and societal innovations, not least the Universal Food Coverage.

El presente documento de política pública analiza el rol que desempeña la propiedad industrial y el sistema de patentes en el capitalismo cognitivo, en el que el conocimiento se convierte en el factor fundamental de la producción, así como sus alternativas dentro de la economía social del conocimiento a la que se orienta Ecuador. En particular, desvela el carácter contraproducente de las restricciones basadas en propiedad intelectual para los procesos de innovación y propone partir de la experiencia de procesos de diseño abierto, colaborativo y de fabricación distribuida para establecer una regulación alternativa en la materia e impulsar medidas que aceleren la transición hacia una economía social del conocimiento común y abierto.

Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other without a traditional hierarchical organisation to produce common and public goods, such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux. There is a need to understand how these communities govern and organise themselves as they grow in size and complexity. Following an ethnographic approach, this thesis explores the emergence of and changes in the organisational structures and processes of Drupal: a large and global CBBP community which, over the past fifteen years, has coordinated the work of hundreds of thousands of participants to develop a technology which currently powers more than 2% of websites worldwide.

Firstly, this thesis questions and studies the notion of contribution in CBPP communities, arguing that contribution should be understood as a set of meanings which are under constant negotiation between the participants according to their own internal logics of value. Following a constructivist approach, it shows the relevance played by less visible contribution activities such as the organisation of events.

Secondly, this thesis explores the emergence and inner workings of the socio-technical systems which surround contributions related to the development of projects and the organisation of events. Two intertwined organisational dynamics were identified: formalisation in the organisational processes and decentralisation in decision-making.

Finally, this thesis brings together the empirical data from this exploration of socio-technical systems with previous literature on self-organisation and organisation studies, to offer an account of how the organisational changes resulted in the emergence of a polycentric model of governance, in which different forms of organisation varying in their degree of organicity co-exist and influence each other.

Food, as a basic human need, should enjoy a similar consideration to health and education in our societies and yet it is not so. The former are basic rights, guaranteed by the state to every citizen in developed countries and in most developing ones as well, whereas food is largely provided in a monetary basis: your purchasing power determines your food access. Why is that? can we do it otherwise?

Using Marxist value theory, in particular the circuit of capital, and elements from Paul Virilio's theory of speed, this thesis argues that digital piracy is an accident of value that occurs when circulating capital crashes into the wall of real time.  During accumulation capital must metamorphose from money into commodities and back into more money and move between the spheres of production and circulation. The faster capital can complete its circulatory movement, the more capital functions to
produce surplus value and therefore more capital can be accumulated. However, there is a limit to this acceleration – if capital accelerates beyond a certain limit it cannot assume its particular forms, which has disastrous effects for the accumulation of capital. I argue that this limit is identical to the limit of absolute speed and that capital can achieve this velocity through adopting telecommunications as its medium. Under the pressure of telecommunications, the extension and duration of capital in space and time is compressed into an instantaneous and ubiquitous moment in real time. When this occurs both the circuit and forms of capital disintegrate.

The present research introduces and investigates Distributed Moderation systems - in particular, sites where the votes of users are aggregated in order to rank or grade items of content. The primary subject of this research is reddit.com - a 'social news' website where users vote to collectively determine the level of visibility which will be afforded to submitted items of content. This research is investigative in nature - at its inception there was little published research on Distributed Moderation (DM) systems. The question which has guided the research is "what can we learn about these systems through observation and the interrogation of data which they naturally produce and store in their day-to-day operation?". There are Chapters of the thesis which investigate how DM works in practice (Chapter 5) and how/why individual users participate (Chapter 6). The research also devotes considerable attention to the social implications of producing information resources in this fashion (Chapter 7) - how do the resources which are produced using DM systems differ to those produced in a more conventional manner? At the outset of this research reddit was a relatively little-known website - over the course of the research it has become much more widely recognised and in the process it has changed considerably. Chapter 8 considers reddit from a longitudinal perspective; observing its development has offered insight into both the potential and the limitations of this particular application of DM. The final Chapter re-visits research questions and considers how one might go about adapting DM to other domains, with an emphasis on the political.

This policy paper explores the important role that the knowledge commons could play in the development of a social knowledge economy, focusing on the transformation of the secondary sector of the economy. Based on a discussion of two case studies on the open-source RepRap 3D printer and the Wikispeed car, which are paradigmatic of how the open design commons enable distributed and collaborative manufacturing structures, the paper derives several general principles for the development of public policy and puts forth a set of recommendations for kick-starting the transition process.

The lack of clear boundaries and the distributed nature of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) pose a challenge for the theoretical frameworks which aim to provide a useful methodological tool for its conceptualisation and analysis, such as Activity Theory (AT).
This paper presents the use of AT in the ongoing study of the organisational dynamics of a large and diverse CBPP community: Drupal. This application of AT is being carried out by drawing on the model of activity system to analyse contribution activities; and by conceptualising Drupal as a runaway object, which operates as a nexus for the study of these coordination efforts.
Hence, by presenting the conceptualisation and challenges which are currently being faced, this paper aims to provide evidence of the value of AT to untangle the dense and multidirectional dynamics which lie within these communities, as well as to contribute to the discussion on the limitations that this approach could have for the study of peer production.

Truth is for sale today, some critics claim. The increased commodification of science corrupts it, scientific fraud is rampant and the age-old trust in science is shattered. This cynical view, although gaining in prominence, does not explain very well the surprising motivation and integrity that is still central to the scientific life. Although scientific knowledge becomes more and more treated as a commodity or as a product that is for sale, a central part of academic scientific practice is still organized according to different principles. In this paper, I critically analyze alternative models for understanding the organization of knowledge, such as the idea of the scientific commons and the gift economy of science. After weighing the diverse positive and negative aspects of free market economies of science and gift economies of science, a commons structured as a gift economy seems best suited to preserve and take advantage of the specific character of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, commons and gift economies promote the rich social texture that is important for supporting central norms of science. Some of these basic norms might break down if the gift character of science is lost. To conclude, I consider the possibility and desirability of hybrid economies of academic science, which combine aspects of gift economies and free market economies. The aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of these deeper structural challenges faced by science policy. Such theoretical reflections should eventually assist us in formulating new policy guidelines.

In this Commons Transition Special Report, George Dafermos documents the organizational model of one of the most interesting cooperative projects to have emerged in Europe in the age of crisis – the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC).
Founded by an assembly of activists in Catalonia in 2010, the CIC’s revolutionary aspiration is to antagonize Capital by building cooperative structures in the Catalan economy. Its commitment to the principles of the Commons, Open Cooperativism and P2P, make it a prototypical example of a new generation of co-ops connecting the Commons and cooperative movements. Their position is that a truly collaborative economy can only develop when it’s commons-based.

This paper explores the ways in which a theorization of heritage as a commons complicates the relation of heritage and identity. The paper analyzes how cultural heritage management and theorizations connect with the “old” vernacular commons in rural Europe, communist ideologies, Hardin’s and Ostrom’s theories, and finally with Hardt and Negri’s ideas. Can heritage managers and scholars work as mediators between the global flows of value and local communities, promoting redistributive policies and identity building capacities in the face of overarching commodification processes? How can the notion of a “shared” heritage be mobilized by local communities to implement politics of redistribution and rethinking of ownership against an alienated “world heritage” that frames itself as a globally “shared” common heritage of humanity? What are the consequences of treating heritage as a commons for identity politics?

Una propuesta para vincular el movimiento de soberanía alimentaria y sus demandas sobre el sistema alimentario con la narrativa del movimiento sobre los bienes comunes, desarrollando los argumentos para considerar a los alimentos como un bien común de la humanidad, al cual todos deberíamos tener acceso todos los días y el cual debería ser gobernado en común, y no sólo dejarle al mercado la tarea de la distribución según la capacidad de compra. Hasta ahora, la soberanía alimentaria sigue considerando a los alimentos como un bien estrictamente privado.

Food as a purely private good prevents millions to get access to such a basic resource, since the purchasing power determines its access. In this paper, the commons approach is applied to food, deconstructing food as a pure private good and reconstructing it as a commons that can be better produced and distributed by a tricentric governance system compounded by market rules, public regulations and collective actions. This narrative can sustain the urgently needed transition from the dominating agro-industrial food system towards a food system that is fairer to food producers, consumers and nature. Along those lines, food and nutrition security shall be understood as a Global Public Good and the price of food shall rightly reflect its value to society and its multiple dimensions, not just the value in exchange. Should food be consider as a commons, the implications for the governance of the global food system would be enormous, with examples ranging from placing food outside the framework agreements dealing with pure private goods, banning financial speculation on food or preparing international binding agreements to govern the production, distribution and access of food to every human being.

Knowledge is increasingly thought of as a common good. This is exhibited in the fact that
many central economies are moving towards economic paradigms where knowledge plays a
fundamental role. This paper explores the confluence between both processes, asking in what
ways an economic model based on the knowledge commons can open up new socioeconomic
scenarios in the face of overwhelming neoliberal financialization.

The transition towards a cognitive and post-industrial economy has led to the emergence of new strategies of capture of the immanent productive capacities of the social forces. Heritage entities are subject to, and also participate in, processes by which common creativity and knowledge are being harnessed by novel forms of rent and control. The objective of this paper was to show that conceiving heritage as a common situated in specific contexts rather than as a universal essence can open up novel epistemological spheres of communication between different knowledge practices. Also, it can help bridge some ontological gaps among the various stakeholders in the arena of heritage, such as academics, managers, architects, local communities and market forces. This entails considering heritage as an emergent material and immaterial construction process involving many different agents. Currently, these processes tend towards the privatization of common values and the shattering of local communities. Normally, this situation entails a fundamental alienation between objects and subjects, and the reification of heritage. This paper suggests that considering heritage as a common could provide a different perspective to tackle this crucial problem. Accordingly, scholars should not only be bound to a critical discursive stance, but should also commit to ‘ontological politics’ that would situate them as mediators between the global hierarchies of value generated by heritage and the common productive potential of local communities.

Peer production communities are based on the collaboration of communities of people, mediated by the Internet, typically to create digital commons, as in Wikipedia or free software. The contribution activities around the creation of such commons (e.g., source code, articles, or documentation) have been widely explored. However, other types of contribution whose focus is directed toward the community have remained significantly less visible (e.g., the organization of events or mentoring). This work challenges the notion of contribution in peer production through an in-depth qualitative study of a prominent “code-centric” example: the case of the free software project Drupal. Involving the collaboration of more than a million participants, the Drupal project supports nearly 2% of websites worldwide. This research (1) offers empirical evidence of the perception of “community-oriented” activities as contributions, and (2) analyzes their lack of visibility in the digital platforms of collaboration. Therefore, through the exploration of a complex and “code-centric” case, this study aims to broaden our understanding of the notion of contribution in peer production communities, incorporating new kinds of contributions customarily left invisible.

In this opinion piece, we would like to present a short literature review of perceptions and reservations towards Wikipedia in academia, address the common questions about overall reliability of Wikipedia entries, review the actual practices of Wikipedia usage in academia, and conclude with possible scenarios for a peaceful coexistence. Because Wikipedia is a regular topic of JASIST publications (Lim, 2009; Meseguer-Artola, Aibar, Llados, Minguillon, & Lerga, 2015; Mesgari, Okoli, Mehdi, Nielsen, & Lanamaki, 2015; Okoli, Mehdi, Mesgari, Nielsen, &
Lanamaki, 2014, we hope to start a useful discussion with the right audience.

This chapter addresses the governance of a specific type of constructed common­ pool resource, online creation communities (OCCs). OCCs are communities of individuals that mainly interact via a platform of online participation, with the goal of building and sharing a common­pool resource resulting from collaboratively systematizing and integrating dispersed information and knowledge resources. Previous research of the governance of OCCs has been based on analyzing specific aspects of the governance. However, there has been a gap in the literature, one of lacking a comprehensive and holistic view of what governance means in collective action online. This chapter provides a set of dimensions that define the governance of OCCs. Particularly, most previous work did not consider infrastructure provision in their analysis. This chapter challenges previous literature by questioning the neutrality of infrastructure for collective action. The governance of OCCs is here analyzed through the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, building on Madison, Frischmann, and Strandburg's (2010) adaptation of this framework to constructing commons in the cultural environment. References to Schweik and English's adaptation of IAD to free and open source communities will also be made. The empirical data are drawn from a statistical analysis of 50 cases and four case studies on OCCs (Wikipedia, Flickr, Wikihow, and Openesf). The empirical analysis results in a set of models of OCCs governance. The conclusions provide an assessment of the utility of IAD in the analysis of OCCs, and Madison, Frischmann, and Strandburg's adaptation. Additionally, it ends by addressing the defining characteristics of digital commons.

Ever since Gershenfeld passionately describe personal fabrication in his book “FAB: The coming Revolution on Your Deskstop”, first published in 2005, the technology for such endeavor has been exponentially improved. From a campus-wide movement to a globally active and connected community, the advancement and initiatives for establishing a personal fabrication shows no sign of slowing down. However, just like Gernshenfeld himself noted, the challenge to fabrication community is not the technological aspect but the “social” and “organizational” aspects. To contribute to the “social” and “organizational” aspects of fabrication laboratory (FabLab), TransPortal project takes the local context of FabLab in University of Bremen, studies it and offers suitable solutions to the issues found.
From our initial study, we decide on tackling pressing issues of the lack of documentation system on the FabLab users’ side and the absence of proper administrative platform for the FabLab staff members. This report is a documentation of the process under which TransPortal project transpires. We will discuss how the requirements for our system are conceptualized and implemented. The philosophy, technology and methodology used in this project will be shown and justified. The user study will invalidate the effectiveness and efficiency of TransPortal implementation. The satisfying result proves that TransPortal, as a system, has high usability and learnability while, as an initiative, opens door to more exploratory ideas to the betterment of personal fabrication community and experience."""

The food system, the most important driver of planetary transformation, is broken. Therefore, seeking a sustainable and socially-fair transition pathway out of this crisis becomes an issue of utmost priority. The consideration of food as a commodity, a social construct that played a central role in this crisis, remains the uncontested narrative to lead the different transition pathways, which seems rather contradictory. By exploring the normative values on food, this paper seeks to understand how relevant is the hegemonic narrative of food as commodity and its alternative of food as commons to determine transition trajectories and food policy beliefs. Applying the multi-level perspective framework and developing the ill-studied agency in transition, this research enquired food-related professionals that belong to an online community of practice (N = 95) to check whether the valuation of food is relevant to explain personal stances in transition. Results suggest that the view of food as commodity is positively correlated with a gradually-reforming attitude, whereas food as commons is positively correlated with the counter-hegemonic transformers, regardless of the self-defined position in the transition landscape (regime or niches). At a personal level, there are multiple loci of resistance with counter-hegemonic attitudes in varied institutions of the regime and the innovative niches, many of them holding this discourse of food as commons. Conversely, alter-hegemonic attitudes are not positively correlated with the alternative discourse, and they may inadvertently or purportedly reinforce the neoliberal narrative. Food as commons seems to be a relevant framework that could enrich the multiple transformative constituencies that challenge the industrial food system and therefore facilitate the convergence of movements that reject the commodification of food.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to see how digital societies' studies can be inspired by cross-cultural management. Design/methodology/approach – Theory critical analysis and review. Findings – The paper reveals many similarities and analogies, allowing for useful connections between cross-cultural management research, and studying digital societies. Originality/value – By exposing methodological and theoretical links of cross-cultural management field in general, and Magala's contribution in particular, the following paper helps in better understanding of contemporary research on digital societies, as well as allows for the use of already proven methodologies and approaches in the emerging field of the internet studies.

AIMS. This qualitative study explored a phenomenon of epistemic communality around a Twitter hashtag. The primary aim of the study was to explore communal epistemic production on the Twitter platform, especially in the context of a mutually shared hashtag. The study explored the peer- production of knowledge and epistemic structures in the context of a specialist domain collaborating in the open Web. The secondary aim was to explore how Twitter functions as a platform for networked expertise and as a public agora for practitioners’ expert discourse. This nascent mode of cultural production leads to the development of expert cultures on Twitter and in the open Web. This creates new contexts for informal collaborative learning and cultral production potentially answering some of the competence challenges presented by the 21st century.

METHODS. The hashtag #okfest was launched for the ’Open Knowledge Festival’ conference held in Helsinki, Finland (17–22.9.2012). The participants of the study were open knowledge practitioners who participated in the hashtag discourse of #okfest on Twitter. All public tweets containing the string ’#okfest’ were collected as data. Tweets were analyzed with qualitative thematic analysis exploring the epistemic contributions either included in the tweets or as hyperlinked attachments.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS. The analysis indicated how the hashtag was appropriated to serve as a node of communal knowledge sharing beyond mere reporting from the conference. The analysis observed six themes of communal knowledge building in the hashtag space. The communal epistemic activities in #okfest were likened to the properties of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). A network of practitioners engaging in a mutual domain creates a dynamic ’social learning system’ combining social interaction with the production and dissemination of knowledge. The study yielded a novel theoretical concept of ’expert microblogging’, recognized as a significant genre of cultural production in a specialist domain on Twitter and in the open Web. Finally the Twitter platform was ascertained as a site for the manifestation of cultures of networked expertise.

In this paper I want to look at the definitions of commoning and consider this practice in a digital context. I want to apply this idea in particular to the creative practices which develop with the assistance of digital and network technologies. I want to use forking, a practice which developed within the community of free software programmers, beyond the obvious environment of software community and relate it to practices which work in a similar way within an art context. A case study which I will use for this purpose is my curatorial project common practice posed here not as response to the question how to curate without (en)closure, but as an example of a project that constantly engages and battles with this problem.

Die Grundideen des Internets sind Offenheit und Dezentralität – jede soll mitmachen können, ohne erst andere um Erlaubnis fragen zu müssen. Gemeinsam sind dem offenen Internet und den freien Projekten, die auf seiner Basis florieren, vier wesentliche Prinzipien: A: Kooperation auf Augenhöhe, B: Beitragen statt tauschen, C: Commons und Besitz statt Eigentum, D: Dezentral-selbstheilend. In einer Welt, in der Peer-Produktion und Commons allen Lebensbereichen zugrunde liegen, würden diese Prinzipien alle Lebensbereiche durchdringen. Eine Peer-Commons-Gesellschaft wird auf informeller Gegenseitigkeit als allgemeinem Organisationsprinzip basieren. Da es keine Gehälter mehr gibt, entfällt auch der Zwang, sich das Notwendige oder Gewünschte kaufen zu müssen. Generell wird es darum gehen, die (re-)produktiven Infrastrukturen so zu gestalten, dass niemand zu kurz kommt – also Lösungen zu finden, die allen ein Leben gemäß ihren individuellen Vorstellungen und Wünschen ermöglichen.