[p2p-research] Your Swarm Registration / enterprise p2p governance

[Henrik Ingo]

I believe the the "underlying theme of power" is exactly the right
place to start such a research and will boldly advertise two of my own
links, second of which is from our Nottingham workshop:
http://openlife.cc/node/49
http://openlife.cc/DirectDemocracy#comment

And continuing again with a short armchair analysis of mine... From
this it follows that a modern enterprise is not well suited for  a p2p
governance model, because in commercial enterprises aka as companies
the power by definition lies solely within its owners ("hegemony of
the owner"). Therefore the balance from "community voting with its
feet" is lacking. By this logic even if a company was seemingly
governed by a p2p process, in reality it would only be at the grace of
the owners, who at any time could take back the power they had decided
to give to the p2p process. (To be continued below...)

In contrast the problem of an enterprise acting as an agent within a
larger p2p system is more easy to approach and as a rule of thumb I
would suggest that such a situation is not so different from when
individual persons act in a p2p governed system. For instance, a
company such as IBM will decide to voluntarily spend its resources on
Apache or Linux projects, without any contractual guarantee to receive
anything in return. This is completely equivalent to an individual
person choosing to participate in such a project. OTOH even this is
not an easy task for many companies, for instance internal processes
for many companies I know would make it impossible for them to really
participate in the blogosphere, because the company culture is such
that employees writing uncensored statements in public is unthinkable.
(Even if the company allowed it, many employees would not dare to
actually write anything more interesting or useful than the average
company press release.)

Also enterprises other than commercial companies (like a non-profit or
a chess club, say) could be more easily governed by a p2p process,
since they don't have owners in that sense to begin with. In
particular, such an enterprise might incorporate in its bylaws some
clauses which would enable easy forking. Yet even then such an
enterprise will probably govern some scarce material goods which
cannot be forked.

(And now back to our main story of commercial companies...) So to have
truly p2p governed commercial companies we must come up with a way to
shift the balance of power from "hegemony of the owners" to a more
balanced situation where power is distributed with the owners,
employees, customers etc... We could start by questioning the hegemony
of the owners directly, is it a true view of a commercial company, or
is it just something our society is falsely taking for granted? While
it is true that the employer has tremendous power of the employee, in
practice it would be terrible for the company if a majority of its
employees revolted against the employer. Similarly if even a
significant minority of the customers are unhappy with a company. So
maybe there is more balance than we think? On the other hand it is in
our society seen ethically ok currently for the employer to restrict
the power of its employees, in particular "forking" of a company can
be contractually restricted by having employees accept non-competing
agreements. (Whereas a Free Software license for instance, enables and
almost encourages forking.)

As an illustrative example to help me get to my point, consider the
military in a modern western state. Arguably, if the Finnish army
decided to take power in Finland, they would technically be able to do
so. (Although, the US adventure ini Iraq proves it is not as easy as
you think and I might in fact be wrong on this point.) However, in no
established western democracy is this at all likely to ever happen.
This is because the values of the society and the military itself sees
the military as subservient to democracy. So again, the question is:
Could there be a way to start looking at modern commercial companies
in a way where the balance of power is radically different from the
current hegemony of owners? If not, then the second question is, how
should society change its values and legislation on this issue, to
better enable such a situation to come by.

Finally of course there is the possibility of a future where
commercial companies are not the primary vehicle driving society
forward as they are today.

henrik


On Dec 25, 2007 10:30 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear friends,
>
> John Chu is doing research on corporate governance and will work
> specifically on this section, see
> http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Enterprise , together with Matthew
> Cooperrider.
>
> Below is a particular question on how p2p governance tackles value
> conflicts.
>
> Any contribution on this query would be most appreciated,
>
> Michel
>
>
>
> >
> >
> >
> > I have started reading up on the wealth of P2P materials. With my limited
> understanding of corporate governance and governance in general whether
> political, economic, etc., one issue that strikes me as important is the
> fundamental underlying theme of power in terms of rule making and
> enforcement which in turn are largely driven by human values (including
> ethics and morals). I wonder whether it is a correct perspective to say that
> one evaluation criterion of the merit of governance system is
> > how it best cultivate, foster and protect the collectively desired human
> values and decide the trade-off in such as and when required. Because if it
> is so, then one aspect of advancing the cause of P2P governance would seem
> to be a demonstration of how P2P system can better handle such an issue than
> other alternatives. I wonder if there is any work on how P2P system and/or
> view specify, operationalise and resolve the human values and their
> conflicts?
> >
...



-- 
email: henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
tel:   +358-40-5697354
www:   www.avoinelama.fi/~hingo
book:  www.openlife.cc