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July 2021

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JoPP#15 will be the last issue of the JoPP
by Mathieu O'Neil 25 Jul '21

25 Jul '21

Hi all With this message, we are making it official: the Journal of Peer Production is coming to a close. This does not mean our work is stopping, only that this particular peer-reviewed, research journal format has run its course. Please find below a summary of this decisions, and of some issues that need to be resolved. cheers, Mathieu, on behalf of the JoPP ed team 1-Journal of Peer Production: this is the end, my friend 2-JoPP#15 TRANSITION: call for contributions - memories of the Journal of Peer Production 3-Archiving: preserving the legacy of the Journal of Peer Production 4-Journal of Peer Production resources: email lists and Twitter 1-JoPP: this is the end, my friend Last year I posted a message about the future of the JoPP, and my interest in setting up a ‘think thank’ for the commons. See https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/jopp-public/2020-April/000832.html Following that message, a debate ensued and eventually it was decided to send out a CFP for a JoPP#15 TRANSITION issue, edited by Panos and myself. This issue has been progressing, but we decided to postpone publication (originally slated for June 2021) to September 2021. Contributors have been informed. I continued working on the think tank idea and together with Zack and other colleagues published the newly formed Digital Commons Policy Council’s inaugural report, on the Coproduction of open source software by volunteers and big tech firms, in June. See https://apo.org.au/node/312607 In the meantime, discussions about the future of the JoPP were happening on the journal's editorial team mailing list and it eventually became clear that the wind had fallen out the sails of the JoPP ship, with no-one really committed to keep it going. So back in May I posted to JoPP-ed: "I've been thinking about the JoPP post-#15 TRANSITION and while I like the idea of having a debate to figure things out, it also opens the door to some really bad outcomes. For example, the journal could sort of peter out over a long period of time, or people who are not reliable and/or not competent could volunteer to 'take over,' leading to negative outcomes. Neither of these scenarios is appealing and I think it is necessary to plan ahead. It's time to face reality and accept that if no-one on the ed team is able to take on a new issue, this basically tells us that time is up. As the person who proposed setting up a journal at the fourth Oekonux conference back in 2009, set up a CMS using Plone with Oekonux, then left Oekonux and re-set up another entirely new CMS using WordPress with the help of the P2PFoundation, and tried to make sure issues came out regularly since, I feel it is my duty to protect the legacy of the journal and to finish things cleanly. So: I am proposing to formally announce when JoPP#15 TRANSITION is released that it will be the last issue of the JoPP. Better to finish on a high and positive note than to let things disintegrate bit by bit. Hope you will agree. @Peter: apologies for not answering before re varia. Please do as you see fit. We will need to discuss archiving / preserving the site. I will ask for input and post ideas here. If people want to use the mailing list to discuss related initiatives, that is of course fine. I am very proud of the rich and diverse issues we have put out. For me JoPP has been a great way to have fun and propose new ways of thinking and presenting academic and activist/artistic content. But after more than ten years doing the JoPP I felt the need to do something different: I have been working for a while now on a new project, a think tank which will continue the work of the JoPP, but with less of a theoretical and more of a policy angle: the Digital Commons Policy Council. We will be releasing our first report on the coproduction of open source software by firms and volunteers in a couple of weeks. Panos joined me in this initiative in the early days and then decided he was unable to continue. Thanks to all for your continued support of this initiative. Special shout-outs to Johan and Maurizio who were there from the start, and to Peter and Kit for their fantastic work since joining! Hope this makes sense to everyone and that you are not upset, but it really does seem like the best course of action." Other editorial team members then commented: they were sad but understood and agreed that it was more elegant to finish neatly. 2-JoPP#15: call for contributions - memories of JoPP Since JoPP#15 is named TRANSITION it offers a good opportunity to reflect on the passing of the journal, so we now call on all members of the JoPP community to contribute to this final issue: please send to transition(a)peerproduction.net<mailto:[email protected]> (or post here) before 15 August your best memories of the JoPP (max 200 words? or more?): Favourite issue? Favourite flame war? Favourite contribution of the JoPP? Or whatever else you like... We will compile all contributions - have at it! 3-Archiving: Preserving the JoPP We also need to think about making sure the journal endures. I asked a computer science colleague (Zack) about options and posted what he wrote to jopp-ed: =-=-=-=-=-= "It depends on what you want to keep maintaining in the medium/long term. I'm guessing you do *not* want to keep maintaining a website based on Wordpress up, because that requires updating the software, verifying people have not broken it, etc. That's fine. But do you want to maintain (and pay for) the domain http://peerproduction.net/ with *some* website available at it or not? That would be nice to avoid breaking links pointing to JoPP papers that might be out there, but it is undoubtfully some burden. If you want to keep the domain running, the best way would be turning the Wordpress-based website into a static HTML website. I confess I've never actually done that myself, but it has been done and it is doable with limited effort. You will then have to keep paying for the domain registration and some static HTML hosting (maybe it can even be hosted for free on GitHub/GitLab, now that I think of it, but that does have some ethical implications) for the foreseeable future. If you do not want to keep the domain running (beware: this also means that someone *else* might squat the domain in the future, and put there something else), then what should be done is making sure that all webpages are archived, at the version you want, on archive.org, before you shut it down. This too can be automated with some limited effort. Independently of these two options, I think it would be nice to also archive the papers of all issues onto a open access platform. I don't remember what's the status of PDF versions of the JoPP papers. If you do have them for all papers, they should be submitted to arxiv or something similar. (I've no idea if this is automatable or not, it will need to be verified.) Doing this will help with citations, article indexing, and search." I then commented: "1-domain name: good point re broken links / squatted. But, who pays? 2-convert CMS to static html: this seems like a no-brainer to me. Hopefully the PDFs will not cause a problem. I've looked into this very briefly and it seems it can be done with simply static, which we already use...? 3-archive.org: also seems like a good idea? not sure how to do it though. 4-arxiv: if not automatable, that seems like a lot of work...? So, these are some options. There could be others: if we have a static html site it could conceivably be hosted wherever people have capacity to support the downloading of PDFs, for ex." Peter responded: "The main concern is the findability of the papers. Anything URL based, i.e. dependent on ‘peerproduction.org’ requires the domain to be live in some form and providing articles based on that domain. Between the two of us, we can afford this until we die … and we might even set up a scheme to trade the stewardship of a few hundred of static html pages (or pointers to them) for generations to come. … this could even be a scheme to perpetuate the JoPP for a very long time if we could set up a team of trustees who care for an html (plus pdf) repository. The DIY approach of which I am a fan. There are for sure other routes to preserving the journal, for instance through libraries. I had dealings with a University library in Germany for another OS papers project which I could try to reactivate. The beauty of such an approach is to make content available in an academically accessible environment (metadata and all!). It might break URLs (although we could provide a technical resource to handle this for a number of years, since permanent URL redirection is part of the grammar of machine-readable URL technology). Both routes require attention — and there are more, as Zach points out, like archive.org, arxiv etc. — and there is no route that guarantees longevity (although I believe that dedicated stewardship for a resource either through personal (the DIY approach) or institutional (the libraries approach) commitment is preferable over undisclosed agendas of projects with rather short-term (in non-internet terms) credentials. So, while the activist me advocates the first (DIY) route, the academic me tells me to get back to "that German library that wanted to preserve your proceedings” — which I prefer in terms of being and staying relevant in academia. This will take some time, but we’re not in a hurry, so if you agree — and anyone else is welcome to chime in — I shall put my academic me to work. / Peter" So, that’s where we are at re archiving the JoPP. We will need to sort this out after #15 comes out. Any help would be appreciated! 4-JoPP resources: email lists and Twitter Finally, there is the question of the JoPP resources e.g. the two mailing lists and the Twitter account. No-one ‘owns’ these but following our do-ocratic principles they should be put to work usefully. Since the Digital Commons Policy Council will be operating in the same space and for the same ends as the JoPP, until someone else comes up with a better idea, I am proposing that some of the JoPP resources be repurposed for the DCPC. Specifically, after JoPP#15 comes out, and the end of the journal is made public: The jopp-ed mailing list ceases being used for the journal and starts being used for the DCPC. The @peer_production Twitter account ceases being used for the journal and starts being used for the DCPC. As for the jopp-public email list (this list): no change, this can be used by anyone interested in peer production, the digital commons, etc, to communicate with others about these topics. Hope everyone agrees with this proposal – if not, speak up, and let’s discuss! :-) Cheers, Mathieu

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