Changing Models for Software Peer Production

The next panel at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Mathieu O’Neill, who focusses on peer production in the sharing economy. How does peer production fit into the precarious, gig economy environment that has emerged over the past few years? Firms might devote some of their employee time to participation in peer production, but this also means that they lose control over their staff productivity for at least some of their time.

Mathieu’s focus here is on Debian, and his interest is in questions of power and legitimacy in this context. What’s emerges here is an ethical-modular organisational logic; this was examined through a survey and interviews with Debian project members, which generated a strong response rate. Participants were 95% male and usually highly educated; about one third of participants were paid, but they are not necessarily acknowledging this in their contributions to the project. Many survey participants did not respond to the relevant questions on this point, however, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Some of this contribution might be organised through project-centred teams, following an ‘open/closed synergy’ logic where the interests of the open source project and the company supporting it align to a considerable extent; this becomes problematic when those interests are no longer aligned and come into conflict, however. For self-employed participants, the logic was one of ‘making the bazaar viable’: contributing to the open source project in their own time but doing for-pay work for clients who need special customisation.

This can result in conflicts between open source purism and change entrepreneurship: between open source evangelists whose highest loyalty is to the project and its fundamental processes on the one hand, and company employees who are still loyal to the project but also see their participation as a way of changing company attitudes. In this way, firms strongly influence projects via employees who are legitimate project participants.

There is also increasing convergence between the communal and commercial models as people realise that there is a need for some financial support that pays for the ‘boring’ tasks to be done.