Money for peer production? (was: Re: [ox-en] There is no such thing like "peer money")
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:27:44 +0200
Hi Michel and all!
BTW: This is really a great discussion :-) .
Last month (45 days ago) Michel Bauwens wrote:
Let's take Linux, for a long time, it was relatively successfull but on a
marginal scale.
You measure success in being used I guess.
It was led by many people which had either the material
conditions or an un-related wage to keep it going. But as it grew because of
adoption,
Grew it because of adoption? Well, in the case of the Linux kernel
this might be true. But then the Linux kernel - or any other operating
system kernel - is a rather special project. If you write an operating
system kernel for the x86 platform then you are confronted with lots
and lots and lots of hardware you want to support - and it gets more
daily. That is not the case for most software projects so the dynamics
of the Linux kernel project should not be simply generalized.
it started getting all kinds of support. I'm suggesting this is
true for all projects which become really important, like Firefox and
Wikipedia.
What does "really important" really mean? Is Firefox important? I
guess the firewall and IP stack in the Linux kernel is much more
important.
You are mentioning the well-known projects. But the reality of Free
Software consists of zillions of projects most of which you probably
never heard of. Alone on the laptop I'm using right now the Debian
package manager lists 1262 software packages. Even if you estimate
that each project delivered two packages then you have more than 600
projects we are talking of. And they are all needed so I can do what I
want to do with this laptop.
Can Wikipedia survive without the Foundation which makes sure the
$2m of fundraising come in to pay for the servers.
It would be much harder but P2P technology - i.e. sharing computing
ressources - could probably help here. But of course it's much easier
to have centralized infrastructure.
I'm suggesting that successfull peer production projects need both a
physical infrastructure of cooperation, which needs some kind of funding and
even paid collaborators, and a means for the core leaders to insure their
social survivability. The issue is that almost every project that has been
studied, has a core of contributors working nearly full-time, and that this
needs funding somehow.
Almost every project that has been studied - that may be true. But
research tends to neglect the 600 projects from the 631 I estimate for
my laptop.
Are you saying this is not true? If so, you would have to demonstrate that
such projects are much more distributed than they are, or that the core
consists of people who do not have to care about their
survivability.
My cent.
I
think this is unlikely, and so I'm concluding that "money", as a means to
mobilize those core resources, is a crucial issue.
Though it might not be crucial it is an interesting question what
types of pouring money into a project are more dangerous for the
Selbstentfaltung than others.
The next question then is: where does it have to come from? There are a
wide variety of solutions there, voluntary fundraising from the public,
support from public authorities or foundations, or support from the
'business ecology" profiting from the common resource, as is the case in
Linux. I for one would prefer a much stronger role of really neutral
patronage, which is one of the reasons I advocate "partner state policies
for social innovation"
You usually favor basic income. Basic income - given it is high enough
and really unconditional - could be indeed be a way - although I think
it will never exist in that way.
May be we can think about conditions which need to be met.
One problem that immediately comes to my mind is a typical money
problem: justice. When some people get paid and others not volunteers
typically have a strong feeling of injustice. May be when projects are
founded by corporations and volunteers subscribe on this basis things
are a bit different. Stephen Weber also highlights problems resulting
form the different time scales between volunteers and paid persons and
the non-public communication in case paid persons are co-located.
Another typical problem is that the motivation shifts when money
enters the scene. This is the root for alienation. So if their are
ways which do not shift the motivation of volunteers than that would
be the best. Basic income is probably the best here.
But this is of course a very unusual way to use money. Money being a
structural force *is* used to make others do what I want. There is
probably nobody who in the long run will do this - besides the state
may be.
Florian always tells me that he is regularly pouring money into Free
Software projects as part of his job. May be he can tell about his
experiences?
Grüße
Stefan
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