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Re: [JoPP-Public] Sharing in/on sharing: socio-spatial, temporal and technological transitions
by Ramon ribera-fumaz 31 Aug '15

31 Aug '15

FYI, apologies for x-posting, For the next American Association of Geographers Conference in San Francisco, we are organizing this panel session that could be of your interest: AAG 2016 CfP: Sharing in/on sharing: socio-spatial, temporal and technological transitions AAG Annual Meeting <http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers>, San Francisco 29 March - 2 April 2016 *Organisers:* Mike Crang (Durham University, UK), Helen Jarvis (Newcastle University, UK), Ramon Ribera-Fumaz (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) Human geography scholarship increasingly deploys the language and practice of ‘sharing’; notably in debates on social and environmental justice; with respect to traditional and digital sharing economies; the ‘conviviality’ sought in efforts to open up public space for civic engagement; and in cooperation and collaboration between academics, activists and practitioners. Thus Popke (2006) calls for an expansion of ethical significance (and responsible action) to all aspects of daily life and to emphasise connectedness to others based on ‘mutual obligations and relations of trust’ (McDowell 2004: 157; Lawson 2007: 3), ‘cooperation rather than competition’ and ‘interdependence over individuation’ (Smith 2004: 11). Yet, from classical anthropology we learn that sharing represents an ‘integration of intimate economies’ that cannot be reduced to reciprocity or exchange relations alone (Price 1975). Therefore, this session aims to expand the conceptual significance of sharing (goods, services, knowledge, space, time, technology, visions and values), theoretically, empirically and ethically- taking fuller account of intimacy and interdependence. There are many possible futures for a burgeoning sharing economy, some progressive, others reinforcing the deep social divisions and wasteful consumption associated with neoliberal emphasis on market choice, competitiveness and efficiency. It is timely to deconstruct the tensions and contractions bound up with interdependent networks of peer-to-peer and face-to-face sharing. This is especially so at this AAG because it is to be held in San Francisco at a time when the ‘success’ of the digital home-sharing market, notably *Airbnb*, for instance, is implicated in exacerbating rising prices and evictions. *Airbnb* originated in San Francisco and is valued at $25 billion. San Francisco is also home to the influential non-profit online magazine *Shareable* which provides a hub of grassroots movements that variously advocate new and expanded sharing economies to address challenges such as climate change, lack of affordable housing, resource depletion and waste. According to *Shareable*, the sharing transformation that is emerging in cities around the world connects communities of interest as varied as the maker movement, collaborative housing, collaborative consumption, solidarity economies, transition towns, degrowth and voluntary simplicity. Acknowledging San Francisco as a provocative reference laboratory on the conference doorstep, this session aims to bring a critical theoretical gaze to claims made by and for a sharing transformation. In particular we seek to explore: · To what extent are we witnessing a reinvention and revival of sharing in our cities? How is this manifest in new and/or progressive ways? · To what extent does the sharing transformation offer solutions for social justice? Community resilience? Carbon-neutral one-planet sustainable development? We invite papers which engage with the tensions and contradictions bound up with the language of sharing and expectations of sharing virtually ‘at scale’ that compete with intimate economies that embed the ‘social architecture’ of sharing in meaningful community relations of place-making. In particular, we invite papers which deal with: · The sharing economy and the geographies of community · Ways of ‘living together’ (intentionally sharing space and time) as a path out of capitalism · The non-economic ‘intangible’ processes and attributes of collaborative networks that formal economic modelling and city planning and governance tend to overlook · Sharing and conviviality, proximity and trust · Structure and agency: individual ‘choice’ and structural barriers to alternative ways of living *Submission Procedure:* Please send your abstract of 250 words or fewer to: Helen.jarvis(a)ncl.ac.uk We particularly encourage contributions from doctoral students, activists, practitioners and early-career researchers, from anywhere in the world. Please send abstracts before 3 October 2015. We will notify contributors of acceptance before 12 October. Please note that all accepted contributors will need to register for the AAG conference at aag.org.

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"The worst piece of peer review I’ve ever received"
by Mathieu ONeil 06 Aug '15

06 Aug '15

https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/the-worst-piece-of-peer-rev… The worst piece of peer review I’ve ever received Six academics share their experiences before delivering a verdict on the system August 6 2015 Earlier this year, the former British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith called, in these pages, for pre-publication peer review to be abolished. “Peer review”, he wrote, “is supposed to be the quality assurance system for science, weeding out the scientifically unreliable and reassuring readers of journals that they can trust what they are reading. In reality, however, it is ineffective, largely a lottery, anti-innovatory, slow, expensive, wasteful of scientific time, inefficient, easily abused, prone to bias, unable to detect fraud and irrelevant.” Far better, he said, to just publish all papers online and let “the world…decide what’s important and what isn’t” (“Ineffective at any dose? Why peer review simply doesn’t work<https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/content/the-peer-review-drugs-dont-w…>”, Opinion, 28 May). In an effort to broaden the debate, we asked six academics from across the disciplines whether their own experience bears out Smith’s observations – and whether they share his conclusion. No one is short of horror stories. Some contributors have received comments that are outright abusive, while our two scientists are very concerned about peer reviewers’ habit of expecting the moon and asking for legions of additional experiments that would take enormous amounts of time and money to carry out. But a common theme seems to be that peer review should not be seen as a monolith to be either worshipped or cast into the abyss. Rather, it is a patchwork of millions of judgements by individuals who vary widely in their conscientiousness, realism, constructiveness, manners and ethics. And none of our contributors – who, of course, are also reviewers themselves – is willing to conclude that the weakest links are entirely beyond strengthening. Perhaps Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick, best sums up the prevailing mood. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about London, he concludes that “the scholar who is tired of referees is tired of life”. But Johnson is also said to have noted that the “true measure of a man” – and presumably of a woman, too – “is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good”. Perhaps that is the quotation on which anonymous peer reviewers should reflect most earnestly. Source: Alamy/Getty All referees will tell you that they are open‑minded, write gently and are on the lookout for work of fabulous creativity. But they aren’t I can remember only two referee reports that were extraordinarily unpleasant. The first was sent to me around 1980, when I was finishing my PhD and submitting papers to journals. It opened with: “Reading this manuscript makes me question Oswald’s intellect.” The second happened a few weeks ago, when a referee’s report on a manuscript of mine began with: “The title of this paper is pretentious.” After a start like that it no doubt went steadily downhill from there, but I have not bothered to read the rest, and may never do so. This sparse number of horror stories is not, I should explain, because in those decades only two referees have been unpleasant: I have had hundreds of rejection letters. It is just that, as a deliberate strategy that I would recommend to any young scholar, I do not commit nasty comments to memory. If the majority of referees like your research, you can be certain that you are doing boring work. To push forward ideas that will matter to the world, you and I may as well accept that we are going to have to upset people and crawl through the trenches of muddy carping and explosive criticism. All referees – and I suppose that must include me – are subconsciously looking for manuscripts that play back to them ideas they already find familiar and palatable, and ones that lend support to their own prior research. That is bad and sad. However, it also happens to be human. Of course, all referees will tell you that they are open-minded, write gently and are on the lookout for work of fabulous creativity. But they aren’t. It is hard for a human being to absorb ideas that are of first-order originality; such ideas, by definition, barely compute. Moreover, it is emotionally difficult for reviewers to be charitable about others’ manuscripts. Schadenfreude survives, if quietly. Was Richard Smith sensible to argue that we should jettison peer review in publishing? I thought his article was a terrific one, and the future may evolve to make him right. However, on balance, I do not see peer review disappearing during this century. First, in economics alone, there are 20,000 new journal articles every year. If there were no journal system to give early warning of quality, it would be even harder – and highly inefficient – to spot the stars among the torrent. Second, perhaps we should spare a thought for the brilliant individual who is stuck, through some early stroke of fate, in a tiny group in Nowheresville, Antarctica. Without a journal system, the ideas of that person might have no chance at all. Although I have sometimes despaired of the ability of academic journals to accept papers that are truly novel, the journal system does work to a limited degree. Some important stuff makes it past the grey-minded reviewers. If there were no peer-reviewed journals, I bet researchers would pay even more attention than they currently do to status symbols such as a university’s name and nation. The simple truth is that the scholar who is tired of referees is tired of life. Journal reviewers are going to keep on being incoherent, making fundamental mistakes, being childlike and gratuitous, forcing us to cite their irrelevant articles, thinking that after 20 minutes they understand our work better than we do after 20 months, leaving out the crucial references they claim have already shown the finding, and all the rest. Between you and me, the only good referee reports I ever saw were written by me and by – oh, wait, no: there isn’t anyone else. This is how we all feel, and in some ways it is surprising how well a voluntary system of refereeing, based on a form of honour system, actually works. Andrew Oswald is professor of economics at the University of Warwick. Peer review is a good way of seeing what the next generation is doing, but I am becoming increasingly selective in which invitations I accept The worst comment I received on anything I have ever written was in the form of a question: “What is this muck?” It was an essay for a journal that claimed to be pioneering new research in cultural and media studies. Doubtless writing about a feminist rock star was just too much for someone! In principle, it seems like a fine idea for work submitted to a journal, publisher or funding body to be assessed anonymously by independent experts. Surely it is more equitable and transparent than individual editors and research managers taking subjective decisions, as was the norm in my early career. But, as with all the ventures by academics into quantifiable systems of assessment, it has grown into a monster. Academics – and those academics transformed into “managers” – have learned how to play around with peer reviewing and turn it to their advantage in determining who wins and loses in the local promotion stakes. And their use of peer review is used by open access publishers to excuse the venality of asking for money up front from authors (something that used to be derided as vanity publishing). That everyone now needs to confirm that they have been peer-reviewed, even if the piece in question was published by the smallest online journal, means that the task of reviewing is now gigantic. In the first six months of this year, I was asked to peer-review more than 20 articles, half a dozen book proposals, and so many bids for funding that my memory fails me. Not all come through anonymously, and if you work in a specialist area, you can often identify the writer. Of course I don’t agree to peer-review everything I am asked to, but I am told by editors and publishers that such is the demand to publish that they are becoming desperate to find people willing to do the assessments. Because it isn’t just a matter of reading 20-odd pages of typescript and passing an opinion. No, you have to log on to complicated websites and answer a host of questions. This can take ages, especially if you are asked to provide information that can be relayed back to the writer as distinct from a box for non-disclosable comments. The complexity of some of the processes may explain the logjams and long delays in getting feedback to writers, some of whom are kept waiting for months. Attempts have been made to raise the status of peer-reviewing to something that can be put on a CV. An example of this is the fanfared creation a few years ago of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s “Peer Review College”: a publicly identified body of about 1,500 individuals who referee applications for AHRC funding and from whom the research council’s assessment panels are largely drawn. I went along to one of their training days, during which we were divided into groups and asked to assess previously submitted applications. In my group we failed two and agreed that two were excellent. It then turned out that our failures had already received some £750,000, while our excellents had failed to win anything. So much for expert opinion, I thought. After receiving a string of half-baked proposals and struggling with the problems of the website, I resigned and wrote to the AHRC explaining why. I could also have mentioned that some other funding bodies pay their peer reviewers – which is some small compensation for their time. I shall continue to peer review because it’s a good way of seeing what the next generation is doing, but I am becoming increasingly selective about which invitations I accept, and I know I am not alone in this. After all, which peer reviewer wants to be reduced to asking: “What is this muck?” Susan Bassnett is professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick. Source: Alamy/Getty Transparency would make it possible for people to take more credit for good reviews In theory, peer review is a great idea, but as it generally operates, it sucks. The principal problem is the typical anonymity of reviewers. This can provide a cover for suppression of data that conflicts with the reviewer’s own results, sabotage of competitors’ funding applications, filching of research ideas or even the pursuit of petty vendettas. I think each of us probably knows of at least one fellow academic they would not trust to review their work with full integrity under cover of secrecy. I certainly do. The lack of professional credit (or financial reward) for this vital activity also means that peer review is too often carried out in a hasty, superficial way. I’ve seen some seriously shoddy reviews, some so cursory that they show no evidence whatsoever of in-depth consideration – or, indeed, of appreciation of the subject at all. I also know of several cases where the task has been delegated to a junior researcher but submitted in the name of a senior academic. Unwilling to do this, I’ve had to guiltily refuse several reviewing requests because I did not have time to do the job well. People might carry out more meticulous evaluations and be more careful of what they wrote if they had to stand up and be counted. One flaky review can scupper a publication, even when other reviewers are positive – which brings me to what is if not the worst then certainly the most infuriating review I have ever received. We submitted a paper addressing a particular question that was amenable to the analytical approaches, samples and dataset that we had available. Two reviewers described the work as well-designed, well-performed and well-written. However, a third reviewer dealt a killer blow: “I have a fundamental problem with this paper.” It turned out that they were not reviewing the work that we had actually done but were pining for something entirely different. “The 1 million dollar question on this research topic is: ‘does lower [measure X] cause metabolic diseases or is [measure X] decrease a consequence of metabolic disorders?’” It made me want to shake the reviewer in question and say: “Thanks, mate – we already knew that this is a vitally important question – but, along with the rest of the world to date, we are not currently in a position to address it. If answering ‘the 1 million dollar question’ had been possible from the dataset we had, we certainly would have done it – but then it would have been a completely different paper, and we would have submitted it to Nature or Science!” Almost as frustrating is when you are asked by a reviewer to carry out some follow-up experimentation that is completely impractical in the timescale given, or is so very expensive it would require a new grant to pay for it. Then there are the suspicions of corruption: the sense, for instance, that some authors get an easy ride from self-chosen reviewers, while some academic editors get an even easier ride from other academic editors – to whom they return the favour. The secrecy of the process also makes it difficult to investigate the suspected biases in peer review, such as the misogyny exemplified by the recent example where it was suggested that adding a male co-author to a paper by two female researchers would improve its quality (“‘Sexist’ peer review causes storm online<https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/sexist-peer-review-causes-storm…>”, 30 April). If reviews (along with author responses) were routinely published alongside papers, we could determine whether this was an extreme, isolated incident, or was representative of something more systematic. Transparency would also make it possible for people to take more credit for good reviews – potentially attracting more competent people to commit to doing diligent and honest reviews within a reasonable time period. Anyone who has acted as an editor or worked on a funding application board knows how difficult it currently is to find such people. They are just too busy with more urgent priorities. Alex Blakemore is a professor of human molecular genetics at Imperial College London. Source: Getty I favour peer review over metrics. Better to be judged by a panel of one’s peers than by citations I once had an anonymous reader’s report so damning that the journal editor chose to paraphrase rather than attach it, saying simply: “It suggests that this article depends on deconstructive ‘turns’ to disguise the fact that it isn’t actually about very much.” The editor’s conclusion was that “the tone of [this journal] is rather more purposeful than will suit you”. I went on to publish the essay elsewhere, to favourable reviews, and am now on the editorial board of the journal that rejected it. I tell my postgraduates that persistence pays. As a recent panel member for the research excellence framework, I favour peer review over metrics. Better to be judged by a panel of one’s peers than by citations. With the REF, however, we were assessing research already in the public domain. What about work snuffed out prior to publication – or earlier, at conception? Peer review of grant applications determines whether research reaches pre-publication. Three things make me open-minded as a peer reviewer. First, teaching creative writing made me aware that emerging voices need to be listened to with care. When peer review fails, it is often through a narrow sense of what is permissible. Second, literary theory taught me that dissenting voices risk being stifled if too rigid a view is taken of what constitutes a valid critical approach. Barbara Christian, in her contribution to The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, complains about those philosophers who indulge in “the kind of writing for which composition teachers would give a freshman a resounding F”. Ironically, as a student, Jacques Derrida submitted a paper on the topic of “time” to his director of studies, Louis Althusser, who passed the essay to his colleague, Michel Foucault, saying, “I can’t grade this.” Foucault’s response was, “Well, it’s either an F or an A+ .” Third, extensive experience of reviewing published work – about 250 reviews to date – confirms for me the need for a flexible response. I have written reviews that sparked controversy and correspondence, and in one case a “right to reply” exchange. But however demanding peer review is, it rarely takes as long as the work under consideration. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “peer review” as: “The review of commercial, professional, or academic efficiency, competence, etc., by others in the same occupation”. Examples include “the evaluation, by experts in the relevant field, of a scientific research project for which a grant is sought”, and “the process by which an academic journal passes a paper submitted for publication to independent experts for comments on its suitability and worth”. Already we see a blurring between previewing, reviewing and refereeing. Interestingly, the OED cites a comment from the journal Nature in 1977 that “publishing a book is a way of avoiding peer review”, as though monograph writers were draft dodgers. Can peer review become a blockage rather than a filter, encouraging uniformity of expression, discouraging diversity? As a young editor, I was forced by a reader’s report to drop a contributor from a collection on what I felt were political rather than scholarly grounds. If peer review is open to abuse, then anonymity is part of the problem. Pre-publication peer review raises issues not found in the reviewing of published work. Richard Smith suggests that “‘top journals’ select studies that are new and sexy rather than reliable”, before declaring that “peer review is anti-innovatory because it […] depends on approval by exponents of the current orthodoxy”. By contrast, a letter in The Spectator in 1996 declared that “this process of peer review is designed to weed out glitchy papers and it generally works rather well”. But what if Smith is right? What if the weeding goes too far? What if it pulls up some of the flowers, too, so that instead of a hundred of them blooming, only a handful can? Willy Maley is a professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Glasgow. Source: Alamy/Getty One set of reviews included a requirement that we repeat the study using a distinct line of mice. This would have required two years of work Ask a scientist whether they have ever received a terrible review of their submitted work, then stand back and prepare for a deluge of anecdotes. Turn the question around and ask them how good they think they are at reviewing the science of others and the dichotomy is striking. The most egregious examples of poor peer review I have come across relate to grant applications. In those instances, one often sees personal bias and efforts to shape the world in the reviewer’s image, which, fortunately, are rarely seen in reviews of papers. To falsely paraphrase Churchill, “peer review is the worst form of review, except for all those other forms that have been tried at other times.” Yet those “other times” did not benefit from the immediacy and accessibility of the internet, and there are emerging experiments in post-publication review (such as F1000 Reports) and preprint servers (such as arXiv and bioRxiv) that are picking up steam. But before traditional peer review is written off, it may be informative to understand its weaknesses and attempt to mitigate them. In my view, the biggest problem is a lack of clarity of editorial decisions. Peer reviewers naturally vary in their rigour and style, but too many approach the process as a challenge to pick as many holes and to suggest as many new experiments as possible. This applies in grant application review as well. Unless one has a strong editor or chair able to discern what is reasonable and constructive, as opposed to what is “make-work” or simply designed to retard the process, the submitter is often left with a laundry list of expected revisions. One recent set of reviews my lab received for a project that described three years of work included a requirement that we repeat the entire study using a distinct line of mice. This would have required a further two years of work and, given that the resubmission window was six months, was clearly not feasible. Moreover, the original experiments would have needed to have been repeated at the same time as the new ones. So I “self-rejected” the manuscript and took it elsewhere. This isn’t to say that the reviewers’ opinions were without merit, but if the editor agreed with the reviewer, the recommendation should have been “reject”, not “revise”. I also experience the other side of the coin as a receiving editor for a cancer-focused journal. Quite often reviewers disagree about a manuscript, and this is where the editor must be clear in their instructions and identify what parts of a critique need to be addressed. If the study can be improved with a reasonably focused amount of work, then revision is fine. However, many papers are sent back for yet more revision. Sometimes multiple rounds of review can take almost a year – at the end of which the paper can still be rejected. We also fall prey to the cascade of submissions where a higher “impact” journal is initially attempted, followed by a descending series of journals in the hierarchy of the field. The pressures to publish in higher profile journals are intense and fuel serial submissions even though journal impact factor does not reflect the quality or impact of a given paper. I also think impact factor chasing is the principal reason – more than advances in technology – for the trend in cell biology publications for increased amount of data. The top journals control the market and have the reviewers do their “dirty work”. We, the researchers, are complicit. But all is not lost. The EMBO Journal touts that 95 per cent of its invited revised manuscripts are published, ensuring that authors are not being led on a wild goose chase. Transparency is being increased by the likes of EMBO Press and eLife, which post reviews along with accepted papers. Obsession with novelty is being addressed by mega-journals such as Plos One that ask reviewers to assess only the soundness of a study. And the advent of preprint servers removes the delay to accessibility. Just as drivers are also pedestrians, authors and reviewers need to see the other’s perspective and offer constructive criticism. Together with increased editorial clarity and realistic expectations, traditional peer review can be saved. Jim Woodgett is director of research and senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto. Source: Getty I even foresee some academics using Freedom of Information laws to flush out the identities of abusive reviewers “This article has a potentially interesting basic premise which could have become something with a considerable amount of work and thought. Sadly the execution is woeful. The article lacks coherence, proper length, full awareness of the literature, any kind of discernable [sic] argument, the case studies are exceptionally poor and seem to add nothing to the main thrust of the article. There is little conceptual awareness here, the writing style is terrible, at times the grammar is abysmal, at others the writing is sub-tabloid. In sum, then, the article reads like a semi-decent undergraduate essay but it has no originality, rigour or significance and is not suitable for publication in an academic journal.” This is apparently what constitutes peer review in some academic journals. Never mind what it says about the psychology of the person writing it, let us just examine it as a piece of criticism. What is it for? What fruitful knowledge does it provide? Where does it point to for improvement? In most areas of professional life, particularly in the university sector, bureaucracy holds sway. This fills academics with dread: the endless form-filling, the peer observation of teaching, the strenuous efforts required to achieve good internal and student feedback. The question of whether all this really improves teaching is moot, but at least academics are now more accountable to students than at any time previously. Yet blind academic peer review trundles on in essentially the same way it did decades ago. The above review, which I was unfortunate enough to receive recently, was so negative that the journal that commissioned it told me that it would be unlikely to accept my article even if the other review was positive. This in effect gave a veto to one poisonous review that lacked any intellectual content. A further problem is the effect such a choleric rant might have on a younger academic. Imagine this was the first review you ever received. You might be discouraged from writing another article for years. Blind peer review should be fundamentally reformed. The lack of accountability is out of place when even job applicants can ask to see their references (and this was instituted to stop character assassination). As things stand, I even foresee some academics using Freedom of Information laws to flush out the identities of abusive reviewers. If peer review is to be kept secret, journal editors should apply some basic standards and establish benchmarks for a quality review. One of them should be to simply ignore demented referees’ reports. By the way, if you are wondering, my paper was eventually published elsewhere, being commended for originality and writing style. The writer, who wishes to remain anonymous, is establishing a website for particularly bad examples of peer review. Send your worst anonymously to vitriol12(a)hotmail.com<mailto:[email protected]>

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peerproduction.net down
by maxigas 01 Aug '15

01 Aug '15

hi, it looks like peerproduction.net is down "globally": http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/peerproduction.net -- maxigas, kiberpunk FA00 8129 13E9 2617 C614 0901 7879 63BC 287E D166 http://research.metatron.ai/ A: Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion. Q: Why is top-posting bad?

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Journal of Peer Production #7: Policies for the Commons
by Mathieu ONeil 15 Jul '15

15 Jul '15

((Reposted from Air-I - apologies for repeated exposure)) Dear friends and colleagues, It is our great pleasure to announce the public release of Issue #7 of the Journal of Peer Production! This issue, which has been edited by me and Vasilis Kostakis, features several articles which explore how the principles of the commons, of peer production and of the social economy can form the basis for a paradigm shift in society. We are hoping you will enjoy them and find them useful! Best, George and Vasilis *-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* New issue -- Journal of Peer Production #7: Policies for the Commons <http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-7-policies-for-the-commons/> *-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* A spectre is haunting the world - the spectre of the Commons. Without a doubt, the world system is in a crisis of such magnitude that the existing state of affairs cannot possibly be maintained for much longer. At the same time, models based on the collective management of common goods and the social economy have sprung up amidst this state of permanent crisis, which suggest that another world is possible. Taking the policy proposals originally developed by the FLOK Society project in Ecuador as a starting point, this JoPP issue explores how the principles of the Commons, of peer production, of free software and of the social economy can constitute the basis for the development of appropriate policies enabling the transition to alternative, post-capitalist social and economic models. The articles collected in this issue address some crucial aspects of this transformation: the transition process from a capitalist knowledge economy towards a social knowledge economy; the transformation of the secondary sector of the economy, with an emphasis on manufacturing and energy; and the reconfiguration of the state and the commonification of public services in the direction of a "Partner State" in which the resources and functions of the state are primarily used to enable and empower autonomous social production. +=================================================+ | T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S | +=================================================+ +-----Editorial section---------------------------------------------------------------------+ Editorial notes: Public policy proposals for a society of the commons by George Dafermos and Vasilis Kostakis The FLOK doctrine by David Vila-Viñas and Xabier Barandiaran +-----Peer-reviewed papers-------------------------------------------------------------+ Transforming the productive base of the economy through the open design commons and distributed manufacturing by George Dafermos Transforming the energy matrix: Transition policies for the development of the distributed energy model by George Dafermos, Panos Kotsampopoulos, Kostas Latoufis, Ioannis Margaris, Beatriz Rivela, Fausto Paulino Washima, Pere Ariza-Montobbio and Jesús López Public policy for a social economy by John Restakis ICT, open government and civil society by John Restakis, Daniel Araya, Maria José Calderon and Robin Murray Towards a new configuration between the state, civil society and the market by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

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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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New board member: Phoebe Moore
by Mathieu ONeil 22 May '15

22 May '15

Hi all I am sponsoring Phoebe Moore as a new member of the JoPP editorial board. @Phoebe: could you please briefly present your research interests and intended contribution to the journal? thanks. cheers, Mathieu

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