Web-based Form as Expression of Networked Sociality in the Community-based Piano Piece Wiki-Piano.Net

Digital and virtual dimensions play an essential role throughout Alexander Schubert’s work, among audiovisual media, mechanisation of performative gestures, stage setting and computer tools for composing. Wiki-Piano.Net, based on the ‘wiki’ peer-production principle applied to the artistic field, is one of his first experiments with online communities’ interactivity. This article investigates the relationships between author, users and performer through the editable website. The intermedia approach extends and reflects human beings’ compositive and performative possibilities. Indeed, a wide range of internet sources communicate with the historical reference of the piano repertoire while also reflecting recent online habits. Nevertheless, the preset form anchors its expressivity to a specific communication, referring to the author’s informatics-digital attitude and a further staged representation. The man–machine dialectics is consequently expressed on different levels, also entailing acoustic-gestural and audiovisual contents. Questioning the authorship principle and generating a non-hierarchical network, Wiki-Piano.Net reflects Schubert’s aim to create a collaborative work towards which he has no control. However, the virtual environment results are strongly influenced by his settings and artistic attitude. The interaction, hence, derives not only from online users but also from the creator and performer through fundamental website mediation.

Exploring Organization through Contributions

This chapter focuses on peer-production as a form of collaborative digital work, closely allied to crowdsourcing and other contemporary working practices that are mediated by digital platforms. Such platforms are a growing form of digital work; however, they raise complex methodological issues. First, although often a single collaborative platform coordinates groups, work can be distributed globally. Second, multimodal approaches require the researcher to transition between online and offline media. Finally, it can be challenging to identify what is ‘work’ as activity boundaries are blurred. It is argued that the use of Activity Theory overcomes some of these issues and its utility in an analysis of the production of the open source software, Drupal, is demonstrated, highlighting the potential for Activity Theory to enable cross-contextual comparisons and proposing the concept of ‘socio-technical systems of contribution’ as a way to understand interactions between networks of collaboration. The limitations of the approach and potential future developments are noted.

Shared motivations, goals and values in the practice of personal science - A community perspective on self-tracking for empirical knowledge

Some individuals do not limit their self-tracking efforts to passively collecting and observing gathered data about themselves, but rather develop it into forms of self-research and self-experimentation, also called “personal science”. This type of N-of-1 research is relevant to the fields of personal informatics, patient-led research and social studies of science, but as a knowledge generation practice is still poorly understood. To fill this gap, we conducted 22 semi-structured interviews to investigate the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of individuals engaging in personal science activities, as well as shared goals and values present in self-research communities. Our analysis is based on a conceptual framework that integrates previous approaches in self-research, as well as in connection with citizen science, the scientific ethos and cooperation in peer production. We identify how self-researchers seek to go beyond personal metrics about their health and wellbeing regarding data provided by wearables, are engaged over time by individual involvement in technology and scientific-related activity, and collaborate following similar goals and values when learning and sharing empirical knowledge with peers. In this sense, personal science can be understood as an example of a more participatory and inclusive scientific culture driven by self-reflection, critical thinking and openness.

Fitness for Purpose in Online Communities: Community Complexity Framework for Diagnosis and Design of Socio-Technical Systems

Recent discourse on Information and Communication Technologies’ (ICT) impact on societies has been dominated by negative side-effects of information exchange in huge online social systems. Yet, the size of ICT-based communities also provides an unprecedented opportunity for collective action, as exemplified through crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, or peer production. This paper aims to provide a framework for understanding what makes online collectives succeed or fail in achieving complex goals. The paper combines social and complexity sciences’ insights on structures, mechanics, and emergent phenomena in social systems to define a Community Complexity Framework for evaluating three crucial components of complexity: multi-level structuration, procedural self-organization, and common identity. The potential value of such a framework would be to shift the focus of efforts aimed at curing the malfunctions of online social systems away from the design of algorithms that can automatically solve such problems, and toward the development of technologies which enable online social systems to self-organize in a more productive and sustainable way.

Counter-Hegemonic Decision Premises in Commons-Based Peer Production: A Degrowth Case Study

Capitalism is evidently the main cause of ecological degradation, climate change and social inequality. Degrowth as a counter-hegemony opposes the capitalist imperatives of economic growth and capital accumulation and radically seeks to transform society towards sustainability. This has strong political economic implications. Economic organisations and modes of production are essential in overcoming capitalist hegemony. This article investigates two commons-based peer production (CBPP) organisations in a qualitative case study by asking how they could align with degrowth counter-hegemony to help overcome capitalism. Social systems theory is used as an organisational lens to empirically research decision premises and their degrowth counter-hegemonic alignment. The results show that this alignment is possible in relatively small organisations. However, to help degrowth succeed, CBPP needs to be more widely adopted, for which larger organisations seem better equipped. Future studies focusing on the concept of scaling wide in CBPP networks in the context of degrowth counter-hegemony are suggested.

Beyond Clicktivism: What Makes Digitally Native Activism Effective? An Exploration of the Sleeping Giants Movement

This article explores how successful digitally native activism generates social change. Digitally native movements are initiated, organized, and coordinated online without any physical presence or pre-existing offline campaign. To do so, we explore the revelatory case of Sleeping Giants (SG)—an online movement that led more than 4,000 organizations to withdraw their programmatic advertising spend from Breitbart, a far-right publisher. Analyzing 3.5 million tweets related to the movement along with qualitative secondary data, we used a mixed method approach to investigate the conditions that favored SG emergence, the organizing and coordinating practices of the movement, and the strategic framing practices involved in the tuning of the movement’s language and rhetoric toward its targets. Overall, we contribute to research on online movements and shed light on the pivotal role of peer production work and of language in leading an impactful online movement that aimed to counter online disinformation and hate speech.

Peer Production and Collective Action

A variety of social movements across the world and the political spectrum are now taking advantage of peer production mechanisms such as collaboration, co-production, and self-organisation. This essay investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer production reshuffles and remediates social change activism today. It explores the convergences and tensions between peer networks and contemporary social movements ranging from informal coalitions and amorphous grouping to traditional social movement organisations. First, it traces the historical trajectory of peer production as it has come to permeate the progressive social movements of the last three decades, linking distinct approaches to organizing to technological innovation. Second, it reflects on the so-called social affordances (and constraints) of digital infrastructure and their role in fostering specific modes of creativity and convergence apt to support protest actors. Third, it explores three types of consequences of peer production for social movements, namely cultural production and norm change, collective identity, and the commons. The chapter then examines three tensions that might emerge in the process of embedding peer production mechanisms and values in instances of collective action, namely: individual vs. collective engagements, peer networks vs. social movement organizations, and self-organized vs. commercial infrastructure.

Are the most influential websites peer-produced or price-incentivized? Organizing value in the digital economy

In 2006, Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler proposed a wager to technology and society author Nicholas Carr. Benkler argued that by 2011 the most influential websites would be based on content produced by people engaged in peer production. Carr maintained that the lure of money and the corporate hierarchies will be more effective. So, after 15 years, who has really won the bet? Are the most influential websites peer-produced or price-incentivized? To address these questions, this paper discusses what peer production is in relation to price-incentivized production. The Carr-Benkler wager is used as a lens to examine the current social and political struggles in the digital economy, to unveil the adversary value systems underneath and the respective implications for organization. We conclude with some reflections on the controversies and ambiguities of peer production and a call for critical scholarship to engage in a deeper discussion on value and organization in the digital economy.