Book of Peer Production
The Book of Peer Production has been released as a special edition of Journal of Peer Production. It consists of papers written by presenters at the Peer Production-track at the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) in Göteborg 2014. It is cool, that all content in the book is in the public domain.
Johan Söderberg and Mathieu O’Neil explain: „In fact, the commons and peer production are two names for describing the same thing: a particular kind of labour relation. This labour relation is predicated on voluntary participation and the self-selection of tasks.“ — This is exactly what I mean by the commons as being a new elementary form (as used by Marx) of social production opposed to the commodity form.
These are the articles of the book:
- Adrian Smith: Technology Networks for Socially Useful Production
- Johan Söderberg: The Cunning of Instrumental Reason: Reproducing Wealth without Money, One 3D Printer at a Time
- George Dafermos: Authority in Peer Production: The Emergence of Governance in the FreeBSD Project
- Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell & Jeffrey Bardzell: Becoming Makers: Hackerspace Member Habits, Values, and Identities
- Maxigas: Hacklabs and Hackerspaces. Tracing two Genealogies
Finally, I would like to quote another snippet from the preface appreciating the important incubator role of the Oekonux Project in the past — combined with the given importance of the P2P foundation:
Inquiries of the sort have been pioneered by Oekonux and the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. They have been involved in concurrent theory development, free software production and community organising, a mixture that has fostered conceptual creativity. The Oekonux project, originally launched in 1999 in Germany, has been at the forefront of critical theorising about peer production. In the view of Oekonux members and sympathisers, the Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production (where the proletariat seizes the means of production through state power) is superseded by a peer productioncritique (where the wage labour relation and commodity production are replaced with commons-based production). The proponents of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation share many of the same concerns and analysis without being as closely tied to the Marxist tradition. The initiative to start the Journal of Peer Production came out of discussions at the Fourth Oekonux conference in Manchester in 2009; our ambition was to create a forum that accommodates these different perspectives.