This is perhaps not one of the most exciting issues, but it is an important one. With the emergence of P2P production processes, most of them outside of the wage relationship and thus no longer in the purview of a relationship of dependence and authority, new peer governance processes have to be 'invented', mostly based on consensus. How does it actually work? The answer is largely technical, and this newsletter is a compilation of various governance systems, as used in Slashdot, Debian, Apache. The article on collective choice points to at least nine forms of communal validation procedures, and finally, we look at some people looking at democracy in a new way.
ISSUE 112, February 5, 2006, Table of Contents
P2P News,
Issue 112, February 5, 2006
P2P Communities and their Governance
A monitor of P2P
developments; a continuous attempt to construct an emancipatory P2P theory; Preferred
themes: peer production, peer governance, peer property. P2P News aims to
stimulate the dialogue between the following social and cultural movements:
the participatory movement, the `open' movement (open access, open sources);
the Commons movement; the relational/participatory spirituality movement.
For
subscriptions write to compiler and editor Michel Bauwens at michelsub2003@yahoo.com
P2P News is an emanation of the FOUNDATION FOR PEER TO
PEER ALTERNATIVES
This newsletter is sponsored by WS, at http://www.ws-network.com/
-
Blogs as a
revolution in scientific publishing
"[Le blog] a été une véritable
révélation dans ma vie d'universitaire. (...) Il faut savoir qu'il faut environ
deux ans, parfois trois, pour conduire une recherche, la soumettre à une revue,
et la voir finalement publiée - si elle est acceptée ! Et, au bout du compte,
le travail sera lu par [au plus] quelques centaines de collègues, tous déjà
spécialistes du sujet. Cela ne me semble pas être un modèle adapté aux
changements très rapides des technologies auxquels nous assistons sur Internet.
Je ne vois aucun mécanisme de publication scientifique traditionnel qui
permettrait la même réactivité que celle offerte par les blogs. Mes papiers (...)
ne seraient publiés que dans de longs mois, à un moment où la situation aurait
tellement changé que les papiers serai! ent devenus sans intérêts.
[...] J'ai été aussi extrêmement
surpris par la qualité de mes lecteurs, et par l'abondance et la pertinence des
commentaires. Je dois dire que ce fût ma seconde révélation. (...) [L'internaute
lambda] a beaucoup de choses à nous apprendre. Ses questions remettent très
souvent en cause nos mécanismes de pensée bien huilés et bien rodés. Elles
obligent souvent à revoir la façon dont nous présentons les choses, et même
dont nous les concevons. Enfin,
j'ai trouvé que le blog était une fantastique école de rigueur. La rigueur est
évidemment mon souci permanent, comme pour tout scientifique digne de ce nom,
j'imagine, mais je me suis aperçu que l'exigence était, paradoxalement, encore
bien plus grande sur le Net que dans les comités scientifiques patentés.
[...] La remise en cause est
permanente, et très souvent les commentaires m'amènent à corriger certains
points dans les billets, déclenchent une autre étude ou m'incitent à repenser
totalement un problème."
Source: http://www.internetactu.net/?p=6320
-
What direction
for the Latin American left ?
"In Venezuela,
after unopposed elections, Chavez assumed absolute control of the
Parliament. Taking advantage of this, he passed laws that accentuate government
control of the economy and another permiting indefinite Presidential
re-election. Can you say "dictatorship?" For his part, Kirchner is
strangling the press with state control over broadcast media with clear
political content. Evo Morales is prepared to nationalize gas. The
question is, will (bureaucratic and corrupt) state control of a natural
resource benefit people more than control by foreign corporations? I don't
think either is desirable nor do I think the extraction and marketing of
petroleum implies a false dilemma between these monstrous capitalists (because
that's what corporations and the modern state are at teatime).
That's not to mention the well-publicized alliance that governments like those
of Morales and Chavez have have Castro's Cuba. Is this the model they want
to emulate? Absolute state control of the economy, censorship and political
persecution?
Source: http://fairlyinformed.com/
-
One of the
best definitions of Web 2.0
Le Web 2.0 renvoie à des technologies qui permettent aux
données de devenir indépendantes de la personne qui les produit
ou du site dont elles viennent.
Il s'arrange avec la façon dont l'information peut être tranchée en unités qui
jaillissent librement d'un site à un autre, souvent avec des manières que le
producteur n'avait pas prévu.
Source : http://www.elanceur.org/
CONTENTS
THE
FOUNDATION SITE
-
For a good summary of the key ideas
around P2P Theory, see the essay for CTheory, at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499;
in French: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Le_peer_to_peer:_nouvelle_formation_sociale%2C_nouveau_model_civilisationnel.
Thai and Italian versions also available.
-
A completely updated bound version of
the P2P manuscript is available in PDF format, in print, for EURO 20.
Send me an email with your postal address. Please support this initiative by
ordering a copy.
-
The Foundation site now has available: a
Directory of P2P Individuals; a first listing of P2P Books; a
directory of P2P Movements; a directory of P2P Resources (tools and
software); a P2P Encyclopedia; and thematic access to the main
themes covered by the special issues. Contributions are welcome at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Main_Page
-
Statistics on readership of the related
Integral Visioning material is available at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=stats
-
Changes to the Foundation Wiki can be
tracked by subscribing to the following feed through bloglines or an RSS
reader: http://www.p2pfoundation.com/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&limit=150&hideminor=1&feed=rss
. It's a good way to keep track of new encyclopedia or directory entries
NEWS
AND CHANGES
-
New address for the Thai P2P blog of Jim
Puntasen, at http://blog.sanook.com/site/alias__birds-in-sky/0/default.aspx
-
Ross Dawson of
the excellent Living Networks book and blog has commentaries about our
vision of a P2P society, after a conversation we had in Chiang Mai recently,
see at http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2006/01/p2p_and_human_e.html
-
Remi Sussan, co-author
of the French-language essay on peer to peer, has written a marvelous
book which introduces the themes of the technological counterculture to French
audiences, and makes different linkages between P2P and transhumanism.
See http://mapage.noos.fr/utopies.posthumaines/ for more information on the book. And if you know
French, listen to the interview at http://www.omniscience.fr/
-
The P2P essay is
mentioned in the Heterodox Economics newsletter at http://l.web.umkc.edu/leefs/htn21.htm
-
Robert Searle has
written us about his proposals for monetary and economic reform, under the
topic of `transfinancial economics'. Here's the encyclopedic entry, at http://p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Transfinancial_Economics
COMMENTS/DIALOGUE REQUESTED
This
is an open invitation to comment, link, and contribute to the views expressed
on the Foundation's blog. Your comments and links will help giving the
Foundation a place in the global dialogue on social change and the role of P2P:
-
1. Peer production, gender, and feminism,
by Meike Reichle, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/?p=48
-
2. John Heron on the history of the concept
of relational spirituality, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/?p=47
-
3. Distinguishing open access from open
process, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/?p=42
-
4. The three meanings of openness, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/?p=30
-
5. The three forms of hierarchy, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/?p=29
-
6. Who owns the wisdom of crowds,
got the most comments so far, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/?p=29
http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/chi04/index.html
P2P-systems replace credentialism, i.e. institutional
validation based on credentials, based on anti-credentialism, based on
self-selection followed by communal validation. On the best known examples is
the Slashdot reputation system How does it work exactly?
1. From the Slashdot FAQ
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520
Who: It's probably the most difficult
part of the process: who is allowed to moderate. On one hand, many people say
"Everyone," but I've chosen to avoid that path because the potential
for abuse is so great. Instead, I've set up a few simple rules for determining
who is eligible to moderate.
-
Logged In User If the system can't keep track, it
won't work, so you gotta log in. Sorry if you're paranoid, but this system
demands a certain level of accountability.
-
Regular Slashdot Readers The scripts track average accesses
from each logged-in user. It then selects eligible users who read an average
number of times. The homepage doesn't count either. It then picks users from
the middle of the pack- no obsessive compulsive reloaders, and nobody who just
happened to read an article this week.
The
end result is a pool of eligible users that represent (hopefully) average,
positive Slashdot contributors. Occasionally (well, every 30 minutes actually),
the system checks the number of comments that have been posted, and gives a
proportionate number of eligible users "tokens." When any user
acquires a certain number of tokens, he or she becomes a moderator. This means
that you'll need to be eligible for many of these slices in order to actually
gain access. It all works to make sure that everyone takes turns, and nobody
can abuse the system, and that only "regular" readers become
moderators (as opposed to some random newbie ;)
How does moderation work? When
moderators are given access, they are given a number of points of influence to
play with. Each comment they moderate deducts a point. When they run out of
points, they are done serving until next time it is their turn. Moderation
takes place by selecting an adjective from a drop down list that appears next
to comments containing descriptive words like "Flamebait" or
"Informative." Bad words will reduce the comment's score by a single
point, and good words increase a comment's score by a single point. All
comments are scored on an absolute scale from -1 to 5. Logged-in users start at
1 (although this can vary from 0 to 2 based on their karma) and anonymous users start at 0. Moderators can not participate in the same discussion as both a
moderator and a poster. This is to prevent abuses, and
while it is one of the more controversial aspects of the system, I'm sticking
to it. There are enough lurkers that moderate that, if you want to post, feel
free.
Moderation
points expire after 3 days
if they are left unused. You then go back into the pool and might someday be
given access again. Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real
goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not
promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be
impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason
to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to
mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and
find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.
Do Editors Moderate? The
Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them. Our
moderations represent about 3% of all moderation, and according to Meta
Moderation, the fairness of these moderations are either statistically
indistinguishable from non-admin users, or substantially better. The raw
numbers are: 95.1% of non-admin upmods are fair, and 94.7% of admin upmods are
fair. 79.1% of non-admin downmods are fair, and 83.6% of admin downmods are
fair. The editors tend to find crapfloods and moderate them down: a single
malicious user can post dozens of comments, which would require several users
to moderate them down, but a single admin can take care of it in seconds. This
tends to remove the obvious garbage from the discussion so that the general
population can use their mod points to determine good. Otherwise, a few
crapfloods could suck a lot of moderator points out of the system and throw
things out of whack. You can argue that allowing admins unlimited moderation is
somehow inherently unfair, but one of the goals of Slashdot is to produce
readable content for a variety of readers with a variety of reading habits. I
believe this process improves discussions for the vast majority of Slashdot
Readers, so it will stay this way.
What is karma? Your
karma is a reference that primarily represents how your comments have been
moderated in the past. Karma is structured on the following scale
"Terrible, Bad, Neutral, Positive, Good, and Excellent." If a comment
you post is moderated up, your karma will rise. Consequently, if you post a
comment that has been moderated down, your karma will fall. In addition to
moderation, other things factor into karma as well. You can get some karma by submitting a story that we decide to post. Also, metamoderation
can cause your karma to change. This encourages good moderators, and ideally
removes moderator access from bad ones. Note that being moderated Funny doesn't
help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.
2. Summary of a research project:
URL = http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/chi04/index.html
"Can
a system of distributed moderation quickly and consistently separate high and
low quality comments in an online conversation? Analysis of the site
Slashdot.org suggests that the answer is a qualified yes, but that important
challenges remain for designers of such systems. Thousands of users act as
moderators. Final scores for comments are reasonably dispersed and the
community generally agrees that moderations are fair. On the other hand, much
of a conversation can pass before the best and worst comments are identified.
Of those moderations that were judged unfair, only about half were subsequently
counterbalanced by a moderation in the other direction. And comments with low scores,
not at top-level, or posted late in a conversation were more likely to be
overlooked by moderators."
http://www.debian.org/vote/index.en.html
Debian is one of the largest free software projects.
It has a sophisticated voting system in place.
1.
The
Debian Vote Engine
"The
Debian Project has a vote tracking system (DEbian VoTe EnginE [devotee]) which
gives status of ongoing General Resolutions and the results of previous votes.
The
status of ongoing General Resolutions include the proposal and list of seconds,
all important dates and the necessary rules for passage. Of course, the status
will also include one of the following:
- Proposal - Waiting for seconds.
- Discussion - In minimum two week discussion period.
- Voting - Voting process taking place.
- Closed - Voting is over.
The
results of previous votes (closed resolutions) include the outcome as well as a
list of all people who voted and what their vote was. It also has available the
text of each vote sent, unless it was a secret ballot. Debian uses the Condorcet method for project leader elections (the
wikipedia article linked to is pretty informative). Simplistically, plain
Condorcet's method can be stated like so
Consider
all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there
is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way
race with that candidate.
The
problem is that in complex elections, there may well be a circular relations
ship in which A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Most of the variations on
Condorcet use various means of resolving the tie.
2. About Debian
`The
Debian
Project is an association of individuals who
have made common cause to create a free
operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux,
or simply Debian
for short. An operating system is
the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. At the
core of an operating system is the kernel. The kernel is the most fundamental
program on the computer and does all the basic housekeeping and lets you start
other programs.
Debian
systems currently use the Linux
kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus
Torvalds and supported by thousands of
programmers worldwide.
3. More Information
More info on the
Condorcet method, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
See here for info
on the organization and structure of Debian, at http://www.debian.org/intro/organization
http://feather.planetapache.org/?p=20
Apache is the software that runs the servers that run
the internet. It is managed through a Foundation, whose management principles
are outlined here:
"The
ASF has formalized processes and procedures that we believe represent best practices governance.
All new projects must pass through an incubation
period to ensure that all of the project's
members have internalized these processes. However, each project's leadership
has a tremendous amount of discretion in managing within this framework. For
example, the Apache Derby project,
who emerged in July 2005 as an independent project after 11 months in
incubation, has recently been trying to figure out how to manage relationships
between some of its contributors. Some folks get along better than others. They
have asked for advice, but ultimately, how they choose to manage their contributors
is at their own discretion. For a lot of folks, this can understandly be
excessive overhead, particularly if their goal is to just release source code.
But for companies who want to tap into the full value of having a community of
users and developers, I posit that working with a foundation can help them in
many cases more effectively realize these goals. Building a community with a
healthy mix of firm and non-firm contributors on a system like SourceForge
requires tremendous start up costs in establishing community roles and
governance policies. It's not just a matter of enticing outside developers to
work on your project - there is also the matter of creating the proper
incentive systems to keep them there. And, a firm's desire to retain as much
control as possible over the direction of their project can have negative
effects on the growth of the project.
Companies
release their source code to increase the rate of adoption of their product(s),
to pursue R&D efforts more cost efficiently, or to encourage standards
creation around a certain technology. There are certain advantages 'sponsored'
projects, e.g. projects that have been spun out by a proprietary firm, have
over organically built community projects. To quote researchers Joel
West and Siobhan O'Mahoney
from their paper
contrasting these communities, 'sponsored' projects may have more clearly
defined architecture, may come with a more mature code base, may have more
viability because of their financial backing, may have more marketing muscle,
and may have a more established base of existing developers. However,
'sponsored' projects run into trouble in the following areas: 1) outside
contributors may find difficulty in seeing how they can "make their mark" on a
vendor sponsored project, which may reduce incentives to participate; 2) managing
the modularity of a vendor sponsored project is important, because outside
contributors who don't participate in the design phase have less vested
ownership in its future success; 3) contributors may react negatively to
vendors it perceives as not truly participating in "collaborative
partnerships."
So
how do the researchers propose firms bridge these issues? They point to a case
study they conducted on VistA, a healthcare
management solution that was developed by the Veterans Affairs department. They
concluded, "both public and private sponsors need to create some type of buffer
institution to manage the community-commercial boundary...In order for a sponsor
of any kind to grow an external community around a previously developed project,
a buffer organization is needed ... Without a buffer organization, it will be
difficult for the sponsor to gain legitimacy in the eyes of all stakeholders."
2. The meritocratic principles of Apache's management
practices
URL = http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
"Unlike
other software development efforts done under an open source license, the
Apache Web Server was not initiated by a single developer (for example, like
the Linux Kernel, or the Perl/ Python languages), but started as a diverse
group of people that shared common interests and got to know each other by
exchanging information, fixes and suggestions. As the group started to develop
their own version of the software, moving away from the NCSA version, more
people were attracted and started to help out, first by sending little patches,
or suggestions, or replying to email on the mail list, later by more important
contributions. When the group felt that the person had "earned" the
merit to be part of the development community, they granted direct access to
the code repository, thus increasing the group and increasing the ability of
the group to develop the program, and to maintain and develop it more
effectively. We call this basic principle "meritocracy": literally,
govern of merit.
What
is interesting to note is that the process scaled very well without creating
friction, because unlike in other situations where power is a scarce and
conservative resource, in the apache group newcomers were seen as volunteers
that wanted to help, rather than people that wanted to steal a position. Being
no conservative resource at stake (money, energy, time), the group was happy to
have new people coming in and help, they were only filtering the people that
they believed committed enough for the task and matched the human attitudes
required to work well with others, especially in disagreement."
3. Advantages of the Apache approach
URL = http://feather.planetapache.org/?p=22
- Experience: Managing an open
source community or project is not the same as managing a internal project
or team. On an internal project, there are well established levers that
can be manipulated by management to induce desired results: project plans,
timelines, budgets, and formal incentive systems (such as promotions,
demotions, bonuses). Open source is different. If you have a healthy open
source community, one marked by a pluralism of contributors, many of these
contributors might not be on your payroll. Sure, all of our projects have
plans and timelines, but these guidelines are extremely fluid and usually
governed by achievement measured by quality, not time to market. People in
the ASF have been working in and leading open source communities for years
and have mastered the difficult art of herding cats.
- Community: This component of
creating a successful open source project is one of the most emphasized
elements in our incubation process, and for good reason. From what I've seen, one of the
major problems about going it alone is that the old guard tries to retain
as much control over their project as they can, and newcomers have a very
high barrier to entry of breaking into the `inner circle.' The ASF
incubation process ameliorates this problem by placing ASF members into
the project's core group, both to foster a more inclusive environment and
also in an effort to provide guidance and mentorship. Building on their
previous experience in managing other open source projects, these ASF
mentors attempt to democratize the decision making process, increase
transparency, and facilitate genuine dialogue so that new members can
begin to feel as if they can be part of a project's `core' team. This type
of process generally requires an `outsider' or an `impartial observer' to
garner the credibility of and support from other newcomers.
- Legal: Open source
requires developers, participants, and members of a community to be
extremely vigilant of any legal implications relating to source code
inclusions, forks, or divestitures. The average contributor is unlikely to
fully understand the intricacies of all of the potential license issues
and conflicts that might exist. The ASF provides all of its projects with
a legal framework, centered around the Apache
License, version 2.0 and contributors'
license agreements. Far too
often I've seen projects ignore addressing legal implications to their own
deteriment. While in the short to medium term, things may appear rosy,
inevitably problems arise and many projects are unequipped to handle the
fall out. I've seen forced name changes, disputes around copyright ownership, and licensing issues
really damage a project for months - and that's not even mentioning the
SCO lawsuit.
- Diversity: The ASF includes a
wide range of
projects that represent people from
extraordinarily diverse backgrounds
and interests. The ASF members
who 'shepherd' your project through its inital stages are usually
recognized experts in their own fields. While they might not know the
given problem space as well as your project's domain experts, they can
bring their past experiences in open source development to bear. This is
similar to why a corporation might bring in an outside consulting firm to
help generate new ideas or break down staid methods that are no longer as
effective. We believe in the value of myriad perspectives - in our
experience, we have found that the sum is greater than the whole of its
parts.
- Marketing: There are over 100
million results when you search for the word `Apache' on Google. A
majority of those results are related to us, the software foundation.
People (including corporations) know the brand, what it stands for, and
are most likely already deploying one of our many products. Once your
project joins the ASF and graduates from incubation, you have access to
this brand. Of course, this can be a double edged sword. In order to get
accepted, a project needs to be evaluated very closely at the outset. The
ASF has worked very hard to make sure the Apache brand stands for high
quality, reliability, leadership, community, and stability. Thus, our
incubation process requires projects to show these very same traits before
they can emerge as self sustaining communities.
- Networking: The ASF is made up
of 140+ members and thousands of
committers. The ASF family of
members and committers are generally very active, standards setters, or
leaders in the technology industry. It's a great group of folks to share
ideas with. I can't emphasize how much I've learned from all of the people
I work with at the ASF.
http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_178.phtml
Series of articles with a
very good overview of the kind of governance systems that are available.
Strongly recommended though it is heavy going at some place.
"Collective choice systems have been around for a long time.
Since at least the birth of democracy in ancient Greece people have made joint
decisions about important issues, and since at least the knightly tournaments
of the late Middle Age people have competed to be ranked against their peers.
Today Western culture especially values diversity of input when implementing
any type of choice, believing that wide input from a variety of people provides
the fairest result. The Internet
expands this long history of collective choice. However, as we bring collective
choice systems onto the Internet, quantifying and programming them, we discover
the need to be more analytical and more methodical in the techniques used. Thus
we're beginning to learn that we don't know nearly as much about these
collective choice systems as we should. There is a need to analyze and study
them further, to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and to evaluate
their social impact. Fortunately, the social
software and online games on the Internet provides the perfect petri dish
for doing so.
Before any analysis can occur, however, there is a need for a
categorization of systems and a definition of terms. That is the purpose of
this article: to lay out at least some of the ways in which collective choices
can be made, to organize them, to define them, and to briefly consider them. Broadly, there seem to be three methods
of collective choice, divided by the intended result: selection,
opinion,
or comparison.
Selection
Systems: Selection
systems allow for the purposeful choice between multiple items. There are many
types of selection systems, but two in particular, representative systems, deliberative
systems, and consensus systems are worth noting.
Representative
Systems:
In a representative system, individuals cast a ballot for someone who will
represent their interests. They're by definition voting systems and the
heart of any Republican
system of government. When you're voting for a president, prime minister,
senator, congressman, director, or board member, that's representative voting. In most representative voting a winner is
selected by plurality,
meaning the winner had more votes than any other candidate. This works well in
a simple two-member election, but begins to fall apart if there are multiple
candidates, because similar candidates can steal votes from each other, and
thus allow a candidate with less popular ideas to be elected.
Deliberative
Systems:
In a deliberative system, individuals directly make a decision, rather than
selecting a representative to do so. Deliberative systems do not
have to include voting, and the subcategory of consensus systems
described below technically don't, however most modern deliberative sytems do.
A deliberative system is the heart of true democracy. Traditionally
it's been relatively unfeasible because voters were not expected to be educated
enough to make governmental decisions and because they didn't have the time or
capability to regularly decide on issues. The spread of the Internet alleviates
at least the latter problem, since millions of people can now simultaneously
decide on any issue if they so desire. In the United
States the best known deliberative system is the initiative system found in
some states, including California.
It allows for issues to be put directly before the voters through the
submission of sufficient signatures, and then allows the voters to pass or fail
those issues, based on either plurality
(most votes), majority (at
least 50% of votes), or else super majority (some
percentage of votes in excess of 51%). In California, for example, 66% approval is
required for new tax initiatives.
Consensus
Systems:
In consensus systems people jointly come to a consensus as a group through
group interactions. This sort of decision making theoretically avoids the
"tyranny of the majority" and likewise can produce more informed
decision making. It's a variant of the broader deliberative systems, but
one with more group and less individual power.
Comparison systems allow individual items
to be measured up against each other. There are three general categories: comparison ranking
systems, which are largely objective and which typically rank
people; and comparison
rating systems, which more often mix subjective and objective
opinions, and which more frequently rate things; and reputation rating
systems, which again tend to rank people, but also have a subject
and objective mix.
Comparison
Ranking Systems:
In a ranking system, items in a hierarchy (most frequently people) rise or fall
based upon specific, objective, and well-known rules. This is the heart of most
multiplayer competitive systems.
Most ranking systems create a hierarchy of positive rankings
(e.g., "best chess players ever"). However, a hierarchy of negative
rankings may also most be used, most commonly based on a negative criteria
(e.g., "biggest Player Killers (PKers)"). In addition, either
direction of ranking can use threshold systems to mark positive or negative rankings
that meet a certain criteria. A positive threshold might be a "Grand
Master" ranking threshold for anyone with a Chess rating of 2700, while a
negative threshold might be a "Player Killer" ranking threshold, for
with sufficient "accidental" PKs. Ranking systems are somewhat removed from
the other collective choice systems listed here, since there's isn't a
collaborative decision, only a collective result. However their problems &
results remain closely related to the more collective rating and reputation
systems, hence their inclusion.
Rating
Systems:
In a rating system, the value of individual items (most frequently goods) rise
or fall based upon the largely subjective judgment of individual users. Amazon
and Netflix are two examples of stores
which provide subjective rating systems. Individual users rate items from 1 to
5 stars, then an average user rating is calculated. BoardGameGeek offers a slightly
different example because it not only lets users rate individual items, but
also ranks items against each other based upon those ratings.
Reputation
Systems:
Finally, reputation systems are very similar to ranking systems: items in a
hierarchy (most frequently people) rise or fall based upon specific and
well-known rules. However, unlike true ranking systems, reputation systems
instead base their rules for rise and fall upon other user feedback. The goal of a reputation system is
ultimately to create a trust metric that often allows different users access to
different powers. We'll be covering reputation systems a bit more thoroughly in
a couple of weeks.
Conclusion: There
are a variety of ways to measure the collective choices of a large group of
people. We've outline nine here: representative, deliberative, and consensus
selection systems; ranking, rating, and reputation comparison systems; and
three varieties of opinion systems. When developing social software it is
important to understand the difference between these broad categories of
systems and to use lessons already learned from the appropriate category in
your own social software designs.
2. More Information
More analysis of rating
systems in a follow-up article at http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_179.phtml
Ranking Systems are then
described as well, http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2006/01/ranking_systems.html
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/05/15/liquid_democracy.html
More and more traditional
representative democracy is seen as
having serious limitations, partly because it is based on an earlier
technological paradigm of `batch processing'. We vote once every so many years,
having to average out our multiple singular opinions to one fairly gross
average. Liquid Democracy attempts to overcome that by making decision-making
continuous and allowing the use of proxies with more expertise. Fuzzy Democracy
attempts to go beyond binary choices.
1. Liquid Democracy
"In LiquidDemocracy, everyone does indeed get to vote on every
issue. But you can give your vote to a proxy. AND, they can give your vote to
their proxy. So, say you don't know much about the space program -- you give
your votes on things relating to the space program to someone who has similar
political views to you but who knows more about the space program (and they can
pass the vote on if they choose). It
seems to me that LiquidDemocracy solves the "ordinary people have no time
to learn about every issue" problem. One way to look at LiquidDemocracy is as
representative democracy, but much more fine-grained; you don't have to elect
just one guy to represent you on every issue, you can have different
specialists for different issues. Second, there is no GerryMandering (at least,
not in the process of choosing representatives); your single vote empowers your
chosen representative a little bit; you don't have to get more than 50% of the
people in your area to vote for the same guy before there is any effect."
More on the idea:
1) http://twistedmatrix.com/users/jh.twistd/python/moin.cgi/LiquidDemocracyVotingSystem
2) http://purl.net/wiki/python/LiquidDemocracy
2. Fuzzy Democracy
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/572.de.html
"This lecture first focuses on the roots of democracy as it was
meant in the ancient world as direct realization of human rights and direct
participation. As a theoretical fundament, there will be a brief overview over
the history of democracy. We will take the original ideas behind democracy and
show how and why -- very much justified by the state of ancient societies and
ancient means of communications -- democracy evolved into a form of
represantative election, which still is, after many centuries, the unadapted
way we practice democracy today. After
deconstructing our modern idea of democracy, we will focus on different
approaches to reach closer to the original ideals with modern technologies. We
will elaborate on direct communication in forums and decision making,
non-binary decision models ("fuzzy voting" by using fuzzy logic and
statistics on vote distributions), webs of trust, online discussions and voting
in forums and other means. It is
also very important to understand the implications of new technologies when
used as a basis for democracy. There are severe limitations to the internet as
we know it today. There are also limitations on who is able to cousciously and
expertedly decide on certain topics. We will take a closer look on security as
well as on how to define proper levels of decision ("Entscheidungsebenen").
We will finish the lecture by
giving some example-implementations of "Fuzzy Democracy" to run small
political parties, companies or associations. We the will then see how these
implementations can be extended to any abstract political system that can be
defined by its interfaces: even town councils or whole states, but how finding
proper decision-levels and technology puts severe limits to this process."
http://www.globenet3.org/threefold.shtml
An interesting approach,
but I have the impression that it is faulty. Why: threefolding makes sharp
distinction between business, government and civil society as representing the
economy, politics and culture. Does civil society not have political concerns
that are autonomous vs. government? Furthermore, with peer production as an
expression of civil society and not business, we have the economy unfolding in
the sphere of civil society. My next argument is that this suggested `balance
of power' reminds of a new form of decentralization, with clearly defined power
blocs, and not distribution, reflecting autonomously changing network
relations. The subtext seems to be, we do not need democracy in business, as
long as you give NGO's an institutionalized say in the overall polity, as the
representatives of the realm of culture. Perhaps better as to what we have now,
but already superseded in many ways through P2P's development. Any thoughts on
this would be welcome.
"There are three global forces that shape the quality and
direction of globalization today. These are government, business and civil
society... The emergence of global civil society changes the world from a
uni-polar or bi-polar world to one that is tri-polar... There are now three
contending institutional powers that reside in the world-global civil
society, government, and business. And there is something else. Though its
emergence, civil society also gives birth, consciously or not, to cultural life
as an autonomous realm within larger society... Second we need to connect the
three institutions to the three realms of society. From social science, we
learn that there are three realms in social life or three
subsystems in society-cultural, political, and economic. The
interactions of these three realms determine what kind of social life or
society we have... Businesses as institutions derive their force from their work,
destructive or otherwise, in the economy. Their natural habitat is the economy.
Governments as institutions gain their power, legitimate or not, from political
life. They naturally inhabit the realm of polity. And the institutions of civil
society derive their strength, deserved or not, from their defense and
articulation of the worldviews and values of cultural life. Their natural
habitat is culture. Businesses have economic power. Governments have political
power. And civil society organizations have cultural power... This is the reason
why we can now say that civil society, government, and business are the three
key institutions of social life. Each of these powerful institutions
has the potential to "represent," in its own way, the realm of
society from which each is active-civil society represents culture; government
represents polity; and business, the economy... Generally speaking, threefolding
means the autonomous interaction of the three realms of society, through
any of its three institutional powers or three key institutions, to advocate
for or to achieve genuine or comprehensive sustainable development.
Book: Shaping Globalization: Civil Society, Cultural Power
and Threefolding. Nicanor Perlas. Center for Alternative Development
Initiatives (CADI). See the foreword by Paul Ray of Cultural Creatives fame, at
http://www.globenet3.org/pubs-forward.shtml
http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2005/11/are_reputations.html
In an age of non-scarcity
of content, trust and reputation become more important filtering agents. A lot
of research is being done to devise interoperable reputation systems that could
be ported from one system to another, but is that really possible: are
reputations portable?
"If value is shifting to trust then a generalized
reputation system could theoretically become the organizing principle behind a
large and diverse set of web services. But, Mary Hodder squelched this thread with
an important insight about reputations - they are not portable..."you can pull
data for reputation from Ebay.... but the thing about the difference between
what Tim was talking about, maps, and Ebay's reputation information is that the
mapping data makes sense when you pull it out of the system, whereas the
reputation data, because Ebay is so skewed, it's such a bizarre social
environment".
Microchunking/recombining reputation: "how much value there
would be in each person being able to aggregate, authenticate, and use anywhere
the elements of their own reputation profile that he/she thinks is best in each
particular context. That way, it's not so much that there would be a 'system'
for reputation that everyone would try to fit into. Rather, individuals could
be free to aggregate and authenticate as much of a broad and deep reputation
picture or profile of themselves as they feel would be worthwhile. And, the way
we think about it at Opinity, individuals would also be completely welcome to
put together multiple reputation profiles of themselves for different contexts,
say one for ecommerce, one for professional purposes, one for political or
dating or community forum purposes. An eBay rating could be shown in a profile
or not as any particular person might deem wise for their purposes. The most
important thing is that elements of a reputation profile can be made portable,
aggregated, authenticated, and thereby be more useful and worthy of some degree
of trust (depending on how broad, deep, and verified the profile is) everywhere
on the 'net."
More information:
-
Trust in Web Based Social Networks. The
Trust Project is an examination of issues related to using trust in web based
social networks. URL = http://trust.mindswap.org/
-
iKarma.com
-
"A small company called Opinity is
trying to address this issue by aggregating many different sources of
reputation data (ie. eBay rating, credit rating, etc.) to enable sites to
interact w/individuals to get the reputation item they need for that trusted
interaction to take place."
-
Check Epinions.com Web of Trust, at http://www.epinions.com/help/faq/?show=faq_wot
PEER GOVERNANCE
-
Governance of the Open Source Development
Lab, which direct Linux, where the power of big companies is limited by the one
enterprise, one vote system, at http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/4109635
« On vante
souvent l'aspect mutualisation des développements, dans un projet Open Source.
Dans le même temps, on parle aussi souvent de bazar... Un bazar qui pourrait
profiter à quelques gros acteurs...
Même dans le modèle Open Source, l'approche peut être structurée. L'OSDL fonctionne
grâce à ses membres qui le financent, mais la structure est horizontale, de
façon à limiter l'influence des gros acteurs : une entreprise égale un vote. »
-
Markets vs. Networks, at http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/socialtheory.htm
; more material on contemporary mgt. theory, at http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/
-
Debian Women and Gnome Women are groups
trying to raise the participation of women in their respective free software
projects, at http://women.alioth.debian.org/
; http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen
-
Coordination asymmetry and arbritage in
peer production, at http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2005/12/media-1_07.cfm
-
A P2P event related to the study of
peer governance, i.e. the conference, "Le logiciel libre en tant
que modèle d'innovation sociotechnique », at http://cmo.uqam.ca/?page_name=ACFAS2006
Congrès de ACFAS,
15-19 mai 2006, Université McGill, Montréal.
Nous vous invitons à
présenter une communication au colloque « Le logiciel libre en tant que modèle
d'innovation sociotechnique : pratiques de développement et de coopération dans
les communautés » qui se tiendra pendant toute la journée du mardi 16 mai 2006
lors du 74e congrès de l'ACFAS à Montréal à l'université McGill.
Le colloque comportera
quatre sessions : 1) L'utilisation des logiciels libres dans les
communautés ; 2) Politisation du logiciel : importance du modèle politique
pour certains développeurs ; 3) Pratiques de développement, de support et
de maintenance dans le logiciel libre' 4) Utilisation de ces modèles dans
d'autres contextes.
Nous chercherons
notamment à répondre à certaines des questions suivantes: comment ces
communautés d'utilisateurs et de développeurs fonctionnent-elles, du point de
vue de leurs exigences et de leurs
contraintes
quant à la qualité de ce qu'elles produisent ? Comment s'organisent-elles (aux
plans social, technique et légal) quant à leurs pratiques d'entretien et
d'innovation en matière de développement logiciel ? Quelles leçons peut-on
tirer de ces pratiques novatrices pour le développement logiciel en général ?
De manière symétrique, quelles leçons le génie logiciel peut-il apporter aux
développeurs du libre ? Le modèle d'innovation du logiciel libre peut-il
s'exporter vers d'autres domaines économiques ? Comment penser l'articulation
du libre au monde de la recherche, en particulier celle en sciences humaines et
sociales ? Dans quelle mesure le développement du logiciel libre participe-t-il
plus largement d'un projet social émancipatoire ?
La description
complète du colloque se trouve à cette adresse:
http://cmo.uqam.ca/?page_name=ACFAS2006_Description
Nous publierons les
textes et les présentations sur le site du Laboratoire de communication
médiatisée par ordinateur - LabCMO - de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (http://cmo.uqam.ca).
-
Linus Torvalds explains some of his objections
to the GPLv3, at http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/02/1636216
P2P ECONOMY
-
Is the social economy gaining worldwide
momentum, a report on the RIPESS conference in Dakar,
at http://swinney.blogspot.com/2005/08/labor-day-2005-breaking-through.html;
and the situation in Argentina,
at http://www.globenet3.org/Articles/Article_Argentina_Solidarity.shtml
-
Special issue of First Monday on eMoney,
internet banking and the gift economy, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/special10_12/
-
The internet gift economy and voluntary
payments, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/veale/index.html
-
100 proposals by the World Social Forum, at
http://www.vecam.org/article.php3?id_article=765
-
The peer to peer patent project: community
review of patents, at http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/index.php;
comments at http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/01/16/the_peer_to_pat.html
-
Happiness has decreased in the last 10
years (U.S.),
at http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060109/ts_usatoday/unhappinesshasriseninthepastdecade
-
Immaterial assets are severely undercounted
in national statistics, argues Business Week, at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_07/b3971001.htm?
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