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system of production that has produced some of the finest software, the fastest supercomputer and some of the best web‐based directories and news sites, here we focus on the ethical, rather than the functional dimension. What does it mean in ethical terms that many individuals can find themselves cooperating productively with strangers and acquaintances on a scope never before seen? How might it affect, or at least enable, human action and affection, and how would these effects or possibilities affect our capacities to be virtuous human beings? We suggest that the emergence of peer production offers an opportunity for more people to engage in practices that permit them to exhibit and experience virtuous behavior. We posit: (a) that a society that provides opportunities for virtuous behavior is one that is more conducive to virtuous individuals; and (b) that the practice of effective virtuous behavior may lead to more people adopting virtues as their own, or as attributes of what they see as their self‐definition. The central thesis of this chapter is that socio‐technical systems of commons‐based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods but serve as a context for positive character formation. Exploring and substantiating these claims will be our quest, but we begin with a brief tour through this strange and exciting new landscape of commons‐based peer production and conclude with recommendations for public policy.

Part III Conditions: Enabling Peer Production

      7 Prophets and Advocates of Peer Production

       George Dafermos

      From the beginning, boosters of peer production portrayed it as heralding a better way of life. Since then activists and researchers have detected in peer production the seeds of a post‐capitalist society (Oekonux Project, P2P Foundation) or worked to help policy makers and governments transition towards commons‐based models (FLOK Society Project). Others have attempted to engage critical intellectuals inside and outside academia (Journal of Peer Production) and to establish peer production as a promising research field in the social sciences (P2P Lab). This chapter retraces the history of these attempts, teases out their differences and convergences, and evaluates their impact.

      8 Virtue, Efficiency, and the Sharing Economy

       Margie Borschke

      Peer production is assumed to be virtuous and public‐spirited, a networked socio‐economic system of production, that is efficient, promotes individual agency, harnesses collective knowledge, creates robust technologies and information and contributes to sustaining the public domain in the Internet era. This organizational innovation is also often associated with the rise of social networking technologies, practices, and platforms in the 2000s and an ethos of participation, sharing, and remix. Yet at the heart of key conceptualizations of peer production is a tension between virtue and pragmatism, between a belief that particular kinds of networked spaces and practices can enable the development of personal and social virtues and also be more efficient than other forms of production. This tension becomes more visible in the metaphor, practices, and platforms of the sharing economy where ethical debates about agency, property, privacy, and collective rights abound and where utopian rhetoric acts as a cover for the corporate drive for efficiency over ethical concerns. This chapter considers these tensions and how the ideals of peer production were shaped by their social and material histories.

      9 Open Licensing Peer Production

       Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay

This chapter traces the evolution of legal conditions meant to support the production and flourishing of digital, knowledge, intellectual or information commons by facilitating access and reuse while preserving them from enclosure. Licenses have been drafted and fine‐tuned in order to subvert and adapt copyright rules designed to reserve rather than to grant rights. Different legal options and conditions set up by peer‐production platforms, or single creators, to users and potential audience can ensure different levels of openness, leading to the construction of informational, cultural, knowledge, or digital commons. From free and open source software to creative works, including scientific articles, cultural heritage, public sector information, and open data, the nature of works which can be peer produced and subjected to an open license extended to functional works such as databases and tangible output, such as open hardware and Internet infrastructure. Reflecting political debates and ideologies in the digital commons sphere, licensing options oscillate between public domain, copyleft, and the reservation or the control of commercial use and derivative rights.

      10 User Motivations in Peer Production

       Sebastian Spaeth & Sven Niederhöfer

      Peer‐production systems often attract larger communities of paid and unpaid volunteers, who contribute to their respective projects. This chapter examines different underlying motivations that fuel these contributions. It thereby takes a tripartite form and summarizes current literature on (1) individual motivations to participate, (2) selection of tasks, and (3) participation in peer production as a social practice. In the first two parts, we draw on self‐determination theory, which discusses various intrinsic (the joy performing the task itself), extrinsic (rewards such as pay), and internalized extrinsic motives (internalized mores and values). The discussed literature shows that contributors are motivated not by a single motive, but by a whole range of interacting intrinsic, internalized extrinsic, and extrinsic motives with different magnitudes. It further shows that peers’ motivation partly determines the type of task they will self‐allocate, whereby (internalized) extrinsic motives seem to play a crucial role in impelling individuals to perform mundane tasks. In the third part, we view peer‐production systems as social practices, conceptualizing these systems as collectives of contributors with shared general principles, whose lives increasingly become intertwined with these communities. Reviewed literature suggests that motivation may be influenced by factors such as social exposure and institutional frameworks.

      11 Governing for Growth in Scope: Cultivating a Comparative Understanding of How Peer‐Production Collectives Evolve

       Rebecca Karp, Amisha Miller, & Siobhán O’Mahony

      Scholars have been fascinated by the rise of peer‐production collectives and how governance mechanisms can foster or inhibit the growth of new contributors. Few scholars have attended to what explains changes in the scope of innovation activities peer‐production collectives assume. We identify five roles that peer collectives can play in the innovation lifecycle, from idea generation to post‐production review, and compare 12 mature peer collectives to understand how their scope evolved over time. Our provisionary comparative analysis suggests that peer collectives that expanded their scope were more likely to distribute governance rights to contributing participants through a more collaborative mode of production. We offer a framework for analyzing why peer collectives grow differently and articulate a research agenda that embraces a dynamic approach to examining how scope and governance evolves.

Part IV Cases: Realizing Peer Production

      12 Free and Open Source Software

       Stéphane Couture

Free and open source software (FOSS) was formally launched in the 1980s by Richard Stallman in opposition to proprietary or closed software. Its speed of development was boosted by the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, and Linux became the original example of crowd‐sourced “bazaar” production whereby the number of eyes “makes all bugs shallow.” This chapter presents the history of FOSS, its modes of production, and its impact on both the infrastructure of the network society and the culture and practices of peer production projects. It ends by addressing some of the challenges FOSS is facing, in particular in terms of developing sustainable models, enhancing diversity in participation, and negotiating its growing integration into market processes.

      13 Wikipedia and Wikis

      

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