June 2015 - JoPP-Public - lists.ourproject.org

Updates about JoPP special issue on Feminism and (Un)hacking
by sophie toupin 27 Sep '15

27 Sep '15

Dear all, I hope this email finds you well. I would like to briefly update you on where we are at with the Special Issue on Feminism and (Un)hacking and some of the thought provoking reflection we are having with this issue currently. At a more mundane level, we are pleased to inform you that the first round of peer review has been completed and we should start the second round in May. So all is good on that front. On a more thought provoking aspect, we have been pondering for quite some time now on how to handle the order of editors. So far in our communication we have been using a standard alphabetical order. Lilly in our group suggested to create a pen name out of our three names to have a single editor for the Special Issue. The idea of a pen-name is inspired in part by the work of radical feminist geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham who did just that a few years ago. We all feel our special issue is perfect for such experimentation as it is a hack on the academic publishing system and the hierarchical order it imposes on researchers. Our introductory article to the Special Issue will probably begin with an explanation of our own contribution to feminist hacking: That is a “HowTo” on how to hack academic standards and traditions from a feminist and queer perspective, while giving equal recognition to all for their work. Also, we feel that the choice of a pen-name does not erase our identities as individuals, but rather aim at questioning and initiating a discussion about the nature of work, scholarship, expertise, and authority from a feminist and queer framework. We are all super enthusiastic about the idea of resisting the traditional authorship structure in our special issue. We hope you will be as excited as we are about this experimentation. Very best, SSL Nagbot (SSL= Secure Sockets Layer, or if you prefer, Shaowen, Sophie, Lilly)

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New Spanish translation
by Mathieu ONeil 26 Jun '15

26 Jun '15

Hi all Someone has translated Primavera De Filippi and Miguel Said Viera's article on licenses into Spanish http://www.guerrillatranslation.es/2015/06/16/entre-copyleft-y-copyfarleft-… [http://www.guerrillatranslation.es/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Light-2CROP.j…]<http://www.guerrillatranslation.es/2015/06/16/entre-copyleft-y-copyfarleft-…> Entre copyleft y copyfarleft: Buscando reciprocidad en el procomún - Guerrilla Translation! ¿Sería posible una licencia de propiedad intelectual que fomentara la reciprocidad dentro del procomún? Read more...<http://www.guerrillatranslation.es/2015/06/16/entre-copyleft-y-copyfarleft-…> We may need to revise the jopp-> projects -> translations pages as for Castellano we solely mention EDSL..? cheers Mathieu

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Admin accounts created for femhack eds
by Mathieu ONeil 09 Jun '15

09 Jun '15

?Hi all A bit of housekeeping - we have created accounts for the femhack editors. Emails have been sent with login info, so they can start uploading content. SSLN can refer to the http://peerproduction.net/about/advice/ page for tips etc. And as always, please be mindful of the Golden Rule: "Do not paste text from Word/doc. files, for it will be riddled with bugs, and cause much formatting torment down the track: paste plain text, and format in the CMS :-)" cheers, Mathieu

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CfP JoPP - Work issue
by Mathieu ONeil 09 Jun '15

09 Jun '15

Hi all I posted the following CFP (which incorporates Peter's suggestion of mentioning the "sharing economy" - thanks) to the following lists: AIR, ACS, CITASA, FIBRECULTURE, IC&S. Will post to Historical Materialism; also sent to members of the COST Action on Digital labour. @Stefano: are there are developer lists which may be appropriate? @All: please forward to others lists but remember to document posts on this list to avoid multiple posts (or if you are feeling energetic, set up an editable page somewhere as others did). 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 <work(a)peerproduction.net>. 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 by 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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Nordic Summeruniversity, Appropriating Technology, 18-25 July, Lithuania
by Johan Söderberg 08 Jun '15

08 Jun '15

Join study circle #6, "Appropriating Technology for Societal Change: Surveillance, Cryptography and Alternative Internets". The study circle is part of the Nordic Summer University (NSU), a nomadic university that can most quickly be described as a hybrid between a summer camp, a travelers commune, and an academic conference. The aim is to bring together scholars and students from different disciplinary backgrounds, activists and practitioners, to present work-in-progress papers and have conversations under relaxed forms. NSU takes place in Druskinikai, Lithuania, 18th-25th July. Deadline for payment and registration: Wednesday 10th June. Accommodation all inclusive for a week costs 280 euro. (scholarships/grants available under certain conditions, price: 100/150 euro) NSU is not a summer school for PhDs, but attending PhDs are entitled 2/5 ECTS for attending/presenting a paper. Please contact one of the coordinators for circle #6 at the same time as you register/pay: johan.soderberg(a)sts.gu.se or gustav.eek(a)fripost.org For information about the NSU summer session: http://w2015.nsuweb.org/ Information about study circle #6, "Appropriating Technology": http://www.nsuweb.net/wb/studiekretsar/?q=dz15JmFtcDtlPWYmYW1wO2FjdGlvbj1md…. Information on grants for students and low-income participants. http://w2015.nsuweb.org/?page_id=310 To register, visit this page http://nsuweb.org/w2014/registration For payments, visit this page http://nsuweb.org/w2014/shop/page/2 Please pass this on if you know anyone that might be interested and not on this list. Johan Söderberg & Gustav Eek (Circle #6 coordinators)

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RFC - peer production and work
by Mathieu ONeil 06 Jun '15

06 Jun '15

Hi all Please find below a request for comments for a planned issue on peer production and work. This has been much delayed - my fault entirely. Rather than choose between 'work' and 'labour' I suggest using both at strategic junctures. We need to release this on June 3 to coincide with the COST action meeting... cheers Mathieu CFP Journal of Peer Production: Peer production and work 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 the 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 labourwork (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 the knowledge, analysis, and regulation of work and labour in peer production this special 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 extract ever-more value from the unpaid labour of volunteer 'prosumers' (Frayssé & O'Neil, 2015), or 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). Finally capitalist firms have increasingly engaged 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? Suggested timeline: CFP released: June 2015 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 30 July, 2015 and should be sent to <work(a)peerproduction.net>. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. Full papers and materials (peer reviewed papers around 8,000 words;"tales of toil" in the Processed World tradition up to 4,000 words) are due by December 31st, 2015 for review. 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, available: http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-119-peer-to-peer-production-a-… 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, in press. Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). Introduction. Book of Peer Production (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.

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