[P2P-F] comment on ronfeldt

Tue Jul 19 13:10:20 CEST 2011

Dear David,

as I could not publish the comment via blogger, I add it here:

Regarding Joseph comment.

The open source governance ecology refers to 1) the community of
contributors its code commons and collaborative infrastructure; 2)
foundations and nonprofits which maintain the projects infrastructure 3) an
enterpreneurial coalition. Josef's comments pertain to the first aspect, and
do not exhaust the wide variety of governance modes that are for example
highlighted by the research of George Dafermos. Benevolent dictatorships are
but one modality and misnamed as they are not command and control
hierarchies and usually involve post-facto control of the permissionless
production process. Second, the foundations have a wide variety of
democratic mechanisms such as election, rotation, etc ... The real issue is
the third aspect, i.e. how far do the businesses influence the community,
which may consist of its employees, and the foundation, which it may partly
fund ...

But, the governance of open source models, now emigrating to physical
production through shared design practices, do not have to be in any way
'perfect' in order to exert an influence. The english revolution of 1688
effected institutional change by changing power to the pre-existing
manufacturing and financial/commercial networks, creating the conditions for
industrial capitalism to emerge. Similary, social movements of the future
may effect change by locating power in the emerging p2p civil society
networks, a substantial number of them functioning in similar ways to open
source projects, or as is now the case in europe, though the popular
assembly model.

Michel Bauwens

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