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

[Ned Rossiter]

hi Michel, thanks for this.

As I note in my response to Daren's review, another challenge for  
network governance is scale. And for massive projects/platforms like  
wikipedia et al (and, let's face it, much of what the net tends to  
do), there are always going to be those dysfunctional dimensions that  
you refer to vis-a-vis platform owners vs. users.  I don't think  
those tensions can ever be 'solved'.  But users can harass owners.  
This worked to an extent with ICANN, facebook, etc.  What the history  
of the net has shown again and again is that when enough users get  
fed up they move on.  And that's where of course developers/ 
programmers are so important.

So what happens when people with an interest in governance don't have  
the skills/time/interest to be programmers? Well, I guess that's  
where they/we either develop basic skills and/or engage in the type  
of lobbying with owners. In the case of the latter, a  
representational structure creeps in and consequently structures the  
mode of communication. And as you note, frustrations very quickly  
arise.  It's no wonder that the net is so often presupposed as  
inherently 'democratic' because of the way so many communicative  
relations online reproduce the structural dynamics of 'democracy'.  
But most thinking of net democracy still assumes a form of democracy  
that reproduces the tropes of liberal democracy and the state form  
(e.g. the residue of the citizen-subject is carried over to the net,  
which I think is a big mistake).

The very existence of owners/sysops indicates the non-participatory  
(or at least closed circle) dimension of networks. There is  
frequently very little communication/participation between admins and  
users.  And most are fine with this relation. Who wants to clear our  
spam every day on a mailing list for example, or attend to the  
numerous admin requests to process postings from non-subscribers  
(which this list still has a strangely high amount of)?

The other obvious thing to note is that the culture of governance  
varies considerably across widely adopted applications. Geert Lovink  
documents this well in his analysis of mailing list cultures. This  
points to the fact that a universal model of network governance will  
never exist.

Personally, I'd be interested to read about how free labour in mmog's  
might be thought of in terms of governance, and how such relations  
and modes of production might hold the potential for political  
organization.  And I'm interested in anthropologies on the governance  
of small-scale projects - partly because such work can enable an  
immanent relation and thus analysis of the practice of building  
networks & concepts (i.e. network governance, in other words).

Another reason analyses of network governance are important is  
because they reveal the limits or borders of networks. The conflicts  
that arise within and across networks helps us understand the 'the  
political' of networks and their geocultural dimensions.

best
Ned

On 2 Feb 2008, at 21:40, Michel Bauwens wrote:

> 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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