[p2p-research] Open source is a company; social media is a country

[Michel Bauwens]

My take on this is that free software communities are
emergent/self-organized and that leadership is crucial, both are true ... I
don't think that it is true at all that open source leaders can appoint
people to do specific tasks ... they are dependent on voluntary
contributions (unless in the case of people paid for corporate open source)
...; the leadership is important for the nurturing, for the vision, for many
aspects, but the real aspects of hierarchy are much more a posteriori
through arbitrage, than a priori through command and control ...

Benevolent dictatorship seems to me largely a myth to protect an old
authoritarian paradigm, just as market thinkers want to call it a market,
even though nothing is bought and sold at a price ... I would rather analyse
it as some kind of constitutional monarchs that have obtain a role of
arbitrage through the accumulated respect they've generated ...

Any people from real free software projects who disagree with this and
indeed think that open source projects are dictatorships, albeit benevolent
ones?

Michel

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 6:25 AM, magius <gmagius at gmail.com> wrote:

> by Chis Anderson (Wired)
>
> image At the Sourceforge breakfast this morning we got some questions
> on what the organizational differences are between open source and
> social media. Here’s my answer:
>
> One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the
> observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while
> countries are best run as democracies. Why was this? Management
> theorist Charles Barnard, in his theory of the firm, proposed that it
> was because organizations existed for a common “shared purpose”.
> Countries, on the other hand, existed only to serve their people.
>
> Shared purpose required singular vision, leadership and top-down
> control. Serving the people, on the other hand, benefits from
> bottoms-up recognition of needs and collective decision-making
> (voting).
>
> Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent,
> self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most
> are run by a benevolent dictator or two. What makes successful open
> source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people
> articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on
> board with specific tasks and permissions. The best projects are the
> ones with the best leaders.
>
> Social media, on the other hands, doesn’t exist for a shared purpose.
> It exists to serve the individual. We don’t tweet to built Twitter, we
> tweet to suit ourselves. We blog because we can, not because we have
> signed on to a blogging project.
>
> Seen this way, open source projects are like companies. Social media
> is like a country. Benevolent dictatorships rule the first; democracy
> the second.
>
> The point: the nature of participation is very different between open
> source and social media, even though people tend to lump them together
> into "peer production". Open source is hierarchical by design, while
> social media structure is simply ruled by popularity.
>
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