Hi Aaron
Thanks for your comment. Of course, you are right - I should have phrased this
better as in "I have not seen many analysis of the weight given to
wiki-volunteer work in the context of broader paid work, or to the issues
related to the presence of paid workers in wiki-volunteer projects". I could be
wrong, particularly in the latter case, but an admittedly quick perusal of the
first couple of pages of search results which you provided below would seem to
indicate that researchers typically focus on how volunteers work
cooperatively-communally in WP, rather than on how wiki-work fits into the
broader political economy (i.e. wages) or how the broader political economy
affects WP?
cheers,
Mathieu
________________________________________
Today's Topics:
1. CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
(Mathieu ONeil)
2. Re: CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
(Aaron Halfaker)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 12:12:34 +0000
From: Mathieu ONeil <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]"
<[email protected]>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and
peer production
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Hi all
I have not seen many studies of labour / work in the WP-WM context so I thought
this may be of interest to some?
cheers
Mathieu
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
<apologies if you receive this message more than once>
CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
Editors: Phoebe Moore (Middlesex University London), Mathieu O’Neil (University
of Canberra), Stefano Zacchiroli (University Paris Diderot)
The rise in the usage and delivery capacity of the Internet in the 1990s has
led to the development of massively distributed online projects where
self-governing volunteers collaboratively produce public goods. Notable
examples include Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects such as Debian
and GNOME, as well as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. These distributed practices
have been characterised as peer production, crowdsourcing, mass customization,
social production, co-configurative work, playbour, user-generated content,
wikinomics, open innovation, participatory culture, produsage, and the wisdom
of the crowd, amongst other terms. In peer production, labour is communal and
outputs are orientated towards the further expansion of the commons, an ecology
of production that aims to defy and resist the hierarchies and rules of
ownership that drive productive models within capitalism (Moore, 2011); while
the commons, recursively, are the chief resource in this mode of production
(Söderberg & O’Neil, 2014).
Peer projects are ‘ethical’ as participation is primarily motivated by
self-fulfillment and validated by a community of peers, rather than by earning
wages. Their governance is ‘modular’, understood in a design sense
(decomposable blocks sharing a common interface), but also in political-economy
terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and control by individually
socializing their works into commons. Conflicting interpretations of their
societal impact have been articulated (O’Neil, 2015). Skeptics view the
abjuration of exclusive property rights over the goods they produce as
irrelevant, and ethical-modular projects as increasing worker exploitation:
participants’ passionate labour occurs at the expense of less fortunate others,
who do not have the disposable income, cultural capital, or family support to
engage in unpaid labour (Moore & Taylor, 2009; Huws, 2013). In contrast,
reformists, often hailing from a management perspective, suggest that the
co-optation of communal labour by firms will improve business practices and
society (Arvidsson, 2008; Demil et al., 2015). Finally activists celebrate the
abjuration of exclusive property rights, and present ethical-modular projects
as key actors in a historical process leading to the supersession of capitalism
and hierarchy (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014).
This last perspective raises a central challenge, which is the avoidance of
purely utopian thinking. In other words, how can commons-based peer production
reach deeply into daily life? How can ‘already existing non-capitalist economic
processes’ be strengthened, ‘new non-capitalist enterprises’ be built, and
‘communal subjects’ be established (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 157)? An increasingly
large free public goods and services sector could well cohabit in a plural
economy with employment in cooperatives, paid independent work, and the
wage-earning of the commercial sector. However analysis of peer production
typically eschews mundane considerations such as living wages, benefits, job
security, working conditions, work-induced medical conditions, and debates on
labour organization. How can peer production operate as a sustainable practice
enabling people to live, if labour and work issues are not formally addressed?
To advance this agenda, the tenth issue of the Journal of Peer Production,
titled Peer Production and Work, calls for papers in two linked areas:
*Peer production in a paid work society*
Nowadays firms attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic
example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as ‘Turkers’,
‘cloud workers’ or ‘click workers’) who accomplish micro-tasks such as tagging
and labeling images, transcribing audio or video recordings, and categorizing
products. This extreme modularization of work results in their status being
that of independent contractors rather than employees with rights,
necessitating novel means of protection and redress (Irani & Silberman, 2013).
The so-called 'sharing economy' also uses peer production methods, such as the
self-selection of modular and granular tasks, to extract ever-more value from
the labour of volunteer ‘prosumers’ (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015). Capitalist firms
are also increasingly engaging with ethical-modular organizations, in some
cases paying wages to participants. Such labour is thus both ‘alienated’, or
sold, and ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to produce commons. Do
traditional categories such as exploitation and alienation still apply?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Peer production and the global political economy
- Peer production and the rise of precarious work
- Peer workers and possibilities for worker organisation
- Does the autonomy of peer workers cause conflict in firms, and how is it
resolved?
- What strategies do firms adopt to co-opt peer production (e.g.,
‘hackhathons’)?
- Do tensions around property rights emerge?
- Subjectivity in peer production
- Peer production and intellectual property, coded work
*Paid work in peer production projects*
How does paid labour affect ethical P2P projects? Mansell and Berdou (2010)
argue that firms supporting the work of programmers who contribute to volunteer
projects, to the commons, will not affect the ‘cooperative spirit’ of projects;
nor can this support prevent the results of labour from being socialized into
commons. Is this always the case?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- How do peer projects deal with the presence of paid or waged labour?
- Is this topic discussed within peer production projects? In what way?
- What benefits do paid or waged workers enjoy in peer projects?
- How does paid labour affect peer production projects?
*Timeline*
300-500 word-abstract due: 30 July 2015
Notification to authors: 30 August 2015
Submission of full paper: 31 December 2015
Reviews to authors: 15 February 2016
Revised papers: 30 April 2016
Signals due: 30 May 2016
Issue release: June/July 2016
*Submission guidelines*
Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by July 30, 2015 and should be
sent to <[email protected]>. All peer reviewed papers will be reviewed
according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See
http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/
Full papers and materials are due December 31, 2015 for review.
Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words; personal testimonies or
‘tales of toil’ in the Processed World tradition should be up to 4,000 words.
*References*
Arvidsson, A. (2008). The ethical economy of consumer coproduction. Journal of
Macromarketing, 8, 326-338.
Demil, B., Lecoq. X. & Warnier, E. (2015). The capabilities of bazaar
governance: Investigating the advantage of business models based on open
communities. Journal of Organizational Change Management, in press.
Frayssé, O. & O’Neil, M. (2015) Digital labour and prosumer capitalism: The US
matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and
class. Critical Sociology, 29, 123-164.
Huws, U. (2013). The underpinnings of class in the digital age: Living, labour
and value. Socialist Register, 50, 80-107.
Irani, L. & Silberman, M. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility
in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems.
Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2014) Network society and future scenarios for a
collaborative economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Mansell, R. & Berdou, E. (2010). Political economy, the internet and FL/OSS
development. In Hunsinger, J., Allen, M. & Klastrup, L. (Eds.) International
handbook of Internet research (pp. 341-362). Amsterdam, The Netherlands:
Springer.
Moore, P. (2011). Subjectivity in the ecologies of P2P Production. The Journal
of Fibreculture FCJ-119. Online.
Moore, P. & Taylor, P. A. (2009). Exploitation of the self in community-based
software production: Workers’ freedoms or firm foundations? Capital & Class,
99-117.
O’Neil, M. (2015). Labour out of control: The political economy of capitalist
and ethical organizations. Organization Studies, 1-21.
Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). 'Introduction'. Book of Peer Production (pp.
2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 08:46:34 -0500
From: Aaron Halfaker <[email protected]>
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work
and peer production
Message-ID:
<CAKP=3wxspzs5zrugwklo_4uf7d7h1mv-ozxmv6s7_jczqc9...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I have not seen many studies of labour / work in the WP-WM context
Genuinely curious: Would the ~25-50 papers per year studying work
practices in Wikipedia/Wikimedia published in ACM human-computer
interaction spaces each year not meet the definition?
E.g.
-
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=wikipedia+work&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C24
-
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=wikipedia+labor&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C24
-Aaron
On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Mathieu ONeil <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I have not seen many studies of labour / work in the WP-WM context so I
> thought this may be of interest to some?
>
> cheers
>
> Mathieu
>
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>
> <apologies if you receive this message more than once>
>
> CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
> Editors: Phoebe Moore (Middlesex University London), Mathieu O’Neil
> (University of Canberra), Stefano Zacchiroli (University Paris Diderot)
>
> The rise in the usage and delivery capacity of the Internet in the 1990s
> has led to the development of massively distributed online projects where
> self-governing volunteers collaboratively produce public goods. Notable
> examples include Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects such as
> Debian and GNOME, as well as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. These distributed
> practices have been characterised as peer production, crowdsourcing, mass
> customization, social production, co-configurative work, playbour,
> user-generated content, wikinomics, open innovation, participatory culture,
> produsage, and the wisdom of the crowd, amongst other terms. In peer
> production, labour is communal and outputs are orientated towards the
> further expansion of the commons, an ecology of production that aims to
> defy and resist the hierarchies and rules of ownership that drive
> productive models within capitalism (Moore, 2011); while the commons,
> recursively, are the chief resource in this mode of production (Söderberg &
> O’Neil, 2014).
>
> Peer projects are ‘ethical’ as participation is primarily motivated by
> self-fulfillment and validated by a community of peers, rather than by
> earning wages. Their governance is ‘modular’, understood in a design sense
> (decomposable blocks sharing a common interface), but also in
> political-economy terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and
> control by individually socializing their works into commons. Conflicting
> interpretations of their societal impact have been articulated (O’Neil,
> 2015). Skeptics view the abjuration of exclusive property rights over the
> goods they produce as irrelevant, and ethical-modular projects as
> increasing worker exploitation: participants’ passionate labour occurs at
> the expense of less fortunate others, who do not have the disposable
> income, cultural capital, or family support to engage in unpaid labour
> (Moore & Taylor, 2009; Huws, 2013). In contrast, reformists, often hailing
> from a management perspective, suggest that the co-optation of communal
> labour by firms will improve business practices and society (Arvidsson,
> 2008; Demil et al., 2015). Finally activists celebrate the abjuration of
> exclusive property rights, and present ethical-modular projects as key
> actors in a historical process leading to the supersession of capitalism
> and hierarchy (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014).
>
> This last perspective raises a central challenge, which is the avoidance
> of purely utopian thinking. In other words, how can commons-based peer
> production reach deeply into daily life? How can ‘already existing
> non-capitalist economic processes’ be strengthened, ‘new non-capitalist
> enterprises’ be built, and ‘communal subjects’ be established
> (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 157)? An increasingly large free public goods and
> services sector could well cohabit in a plural economy with employment in
> cooperatives, paid independent work, and the wage-earning of the commercial
> sector. However analysis of peer production typically eschews mundane
> considerations such as living wages, benefits, job security, working
> conditions, work-induced medical conditions, and debates on labour
> organization. How can peer production operate as a sustainable practice
> enabling people to live, if labour and work issues are not formally
> addressed?
>
> To advance this agenda, the tenth issue of the Journal of Peer Production,
> titled Peer Production and Work, calls for papers in two linked areas:
>
> *Peer production in a paid work society*
> Nowadays firms attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic
> example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as
> ‘Turkers’, ‘cloud workers’ or ‘click workers’) who accomplish micro-tasks
> such as tagging and labeling images, transcribing audio or video
> recordings, and categorizing products. This extreme modularization of work
> results in their status being that of independent contractors rather than
> employees with rights, necessitating novel means of protection and redress
> (Irani & Silberman, 2013). The so-called 'sharing economy' also uses peer
> production methods, such as the self-selection of modular and granular
> tasks, to extract ever-more value from the labour of volunteer ‘prosumers’
> (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015). Capitalist firms are also increasingly engaging
> with ethical-modular organizations, in some cases paying wages to
> participants. Such labour is thus both ‘alienated’, or sold, and
> ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to produce commons. Do traditional
> categories such as exploitation and alienation still apply?
> Topics may include, but are not limited to:
> - Peer production and the global political economy
> - Peer production and the rise of precarious work
> - Peer workers and possibilities for worker organisation
> - Does the autonomy of peer workers cause conflict in firms, and how is it
> resolved?
> - What strategies do firms adopt to co-opt peer production (e.g.,
> ‘hackhathons’)?
> - Do tensions around property rights emerge?
> - Subjectivity in peer production
> - Peer production and intellectual property, coded work
>
> *Paid work in peer production projects*
> How does paid labour affect ethical P2P projects? Mansell and Berdou
> (2010) argue that firms supporting the work of programmers who contribute
> to volunteer projects, to the commons, will not affect the ‘cooperative
> spirit’ of projects; nor can this support prevent the results of labour
> from being socialized into commons. Is this always the case?
> Topics may include, but are not limited to:
> - How do peer projects deal with the presence of paid or waged labour?
> - Is this topic discussed within peer production projects? In what way?
> - What benefits do paid or waged workers enjoy in peer projects?
> - How does paid labour affect peer production projects?
>
> *Timeline*
> 300-500 word-abstract due: 30 July 2015
> Notification to authors: 30 August 2015
> Submission of full paper: 31 December 2015
> Reviews to authors: 15 February 2016
> Revised papers: 30 April 2016
> Signals due: 30 May 2016
> Issue release: June/July 2016
>
> *Submission guidelines*
> Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by July 30, 2015 and should
> be sent to <[email protected]>. All peer reviewed papers will be
> reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See
> http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/
> Full papers and materials are due December 31, 2015 for review.
> Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words; personal testimonies or
> ‘tales of toil’ in the Processed World tradition should be up to 4,000
> words.
>
> *References*
> Arvidsson, A. (2008). The ethical economy of consumer coproduction.
> Journal of Macromarketing, 8, 326-338.
>
> Demil, B., Lecoq. X. & Warnier, E. (2015). The capabilities of bazaar
> governance: Investigating the advantage of business models based on open
> communities. Journal of Organizational Change Management, in press.
>
> Frayssé, O. & O’Neil, M. (2015) Digital labour and prosumer capitalism:
> The US matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press.
>
> Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and
> class. Critical Sociology, 29, 123-164.
>
> Huws, U. (2013). The underpinnings of class in the digital age: Living,
> labour and value. Socialist Register, 50, 80-107.
>
> Irani, L. & Silberman, M. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker
> invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI
> Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
>
> Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2014) Network society and future scenarios for
> a collaborative economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
>
> Mansell, R. & Berdou, E. (2010). Political economy, the internet and
> FL/OSS development. In Hunsinger, J., Allen, M. & Klastrup, L. (Eds.)
> International handbook of Internet research (pp. 341-362). Amsterdam, The
> Netherlands: Springer.
>
> Moore, P. (2011). Subjectivity in the ecologies of P2P Production. The
> Journal of Fibreculture FCJ-119. Online.
>
> Moore, P. & Taylor, P. A. (2009). Exploitation of the self in
> community-based software production: Workers’ freedoms or firm foundations?
> Capital & Class, 99-117.
>
> O’Neil, M. (2015). Labour out of control: The political economy of
> capitalist and ethical organizations. Organization Studies, 1-21.
>
> Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). 'Introduction'. Book of Peer Production
> (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.
>
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
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