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Re: [ox-en] Re: Definition of peer production, characteristics



Hi Michel and all!

2 weeks (20 days) ago Michael Bouwens wrote:
Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:
and has a number of precise characteristics
(holoptism, anti-credentialism, etc..)

Could you please list these characteristics and describe them a bit? I
can not imagine what holoptism means for instance.

HERE ARE EXCERPTS OUTLINING THEM

Thank you very much. Interesting stuff I largely agree with. Many OHA
aspects by the way. Some points.

3.3.C. Beyond Formalization, Institutionalization, Commodification
[...]
Please note my semantic difficulty here. Indeed, it can be argued
that P2P is just another form of institution, another institutional
framework, in the sense of a self-perpetuating organizational
format. And that would be correct: P2P processes are not
structureless, but most often flexible structures that follow
internally generated rules.

I thought in a similar direction but then you brought this up
yourself.

I'm not sure whether the institutions which we have today will by no
way be useful in a GPL society. They serve certain purposes and may be
institutionalizing these purposes similar as today may make sense.
Well, an important point is...

In previous social forms, institutions
got detached from the functions and objectives they had to play,
became 'autonomous'. In turn because of the class structure of
society, and the need to maintain domination, and because of
'bureaucratization' and self-interest of the institutional
leaderships, those institutions turn 'against society' and even
against their own functions and objectives. Such institutions become
a factor of alienation.

 ...of course this one. Indeed I think there is hope, that in a GPL
society at least the well-known types of alienation will lack a
practical basis so they will vanish, but I'm not sure whether this
will be always be the case.

It is this type of institutionalization that
is potentially overcome by P2P processes. The mediating layer
between participation and the result of that participation, is much
thinner, dependent on protocol rather controlled by hierarchy.

This is probably the main question which today is probably impossible
to answer.

One of the reasons of the emergence of the commodity-based economy,
capitalism, is that a market is an efficient means to distribute
'information? about supply and demand, with the concrete price
determining value as a synthesis of these various pressures. In the
P2P environment we see the invention of alternative ways of
determining value, through software algorhythms. In search engines,
value is determined by algorhythms that determine pointers to
documents, the more pointers, and the more value these pointers
themselves have, the higher the value accorded to a document. This
can be done either in a general matter, or for specialized
interests, by looking at the rankings within the specific community,
or even on a individual level, through collaborative filtering, by
looking at what similar individuals have rated and used well. So in
a similar but alternative way to the reputation-based schemes, we
have a set of solutions to go beyond pricing, and beyond
monetarisation, to determine value. The value that is determined in
this case is of course an indication of potential use value, rather
than 'exchange value? for the market.

I'd not mix these two types of values but I understand what you mean.
Indeed there is a democratizing factor in the search engine
algorithms. Funny.

It reminds me also of the way how spam filters work. There are
databases which you can ask for the spam probability of a sending host
or a link in a certain mail. These databases are fed by many people
who consider there mail spam or ham and report the results back to
these databases - me being one example ;-) . This way it is at least
very hard for an individual to influence this knowledge. Instead some
collective knowledge emerges from all these reports. Interesting.

Indeed this is somewhat different from classical reputation based
assessment - though search engine algorithms usually contain some
reputation factor.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

--
Please note this message is written on an offline laptop
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