[p2p-research] peer governance and democracy, request to Ned

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Ned,

I saw a review of your book and particularly this quote, see below.

As you perhaps know, I have recently paid attention to problems of peer
governance, which is I think very similar to your concept of the governance
of organized networks, and I feel I can subscribe to what you say there. I
have been mentioning the issues with wikipedia, digg, and soon, the amazon
reviewing process.

They all share the problems that the participatory processes have serious
dysfunctions, and that the platform owners lack a certain legitimacy to
tackle them, hence a natural inclination to perhaps think that formal
democratic procedures may be of use, as already applied with success in the
apache community etc...

I would love to have your opinion on this, and then to publish it in our
blog as well.

reference to review
http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=535&BookID=388

quote:

In Part I, Rossiter investigates the challenge for democracy in organized
networks. Representative democracy is generally assumed to be a failed
institution in this book, but its emphasis on vertical, hierarchical
structuring, even with a careful consideration of multi-stakeholderism, is
considered to be especially ineffective for the horizontal, distributive
capacities of networks. As Rossiter puts it frankly: "It is time to abandon
the illusion that the myths of representational democracy might somehow be
transferred and realized within networked settings. That is not going to
happen" (95). In the call to rethink representational democracy, the author
hopes that organized networks, which include perhaps virtual and informal
social movement organizations, will "make a strategic turn and begin to
scale up their operations in ways that would situate them within the
formal/centralized [organizational] quadrant, but in such a manner that
retains their informal, distributed and tactical capacities" (75).
Refreshing in this book is the argument that the so-called open character of
organized networks ought to attempt to match up with power-wielding
networked organizations to achieve anything. In this sense, Rossiter is a
realist, pragmatic in his hope for intervention and change for a better
world. This, I believe, is *Organized Networks'* unique contribution to
theory: a middle way can be had between radically decentered movements on
the Web and centralized organizational regimes which hold all the power in
our world. To achieve this meta-collaboration -- or meta-confrontation,
depending on how one looks at it -- the focus must be on formation rather
than form, on "*relational processes* not representational procedures" (13).


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