David Rozas

Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas · Departamento de Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicaciones

Peer production communities are based on the collaboration of communities of people, mediated by the Internet, typically to create digital commons, as in Wikipedia or free software. The contribution activities around the creation of such commons (e.g., source code, articles, or documentation) have been widely explored. However, other types of contr...

This study considers commons‐based peer production (CBPP) by examining the organizational processes of the free/libre open‐source software community, Drupal. It does so by exploring the sociotechnical systems that have emerged around both Drupal's development and its face‐to‐face communitarian events. There has been criticism of the simplistic natu...

Blockchain technologies have generated enthusiasm, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterized by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity...

In recent years, the increasing need for global coordination has attracted interest in the governance of global-scale commons. In the current context, we observe how online applications are ubiquitous, and how emerging technologies enable new capabilities while reshaping sectors. Thus, it is pertinent to ask: could blockchain technologies facilitat...

Today, digital platforms are increasingly mediating our day-to-day work and crowdsourced forms of labour are progressively gaining importance (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk, Universal Human Relevance System, TaskRabbit). In many popular cases of crowdsourcing, a volatile, diverse, and globally distributed crowd of workers compete among themselves to...

Collaborative organising is known to burn like a rocket: it thrives on intense passion, relationality and creativity but quickly falls into pieces. This article explores the underestimated role of events and their affective atmospheres to sustain collaborative work. Drawing insights from two ethnographic field studies within an open-source software...

Upon its arrival, the Ethereum blockchain promised to introduce a new paradigm of Internet-based applications that would revolutionize multiple fields, from finance to IoT to the public sector. Until now, scientific efforts have been primarily focused on theoretical discussions about the implications of the technology and on technical proposals to...

The arrival of Ethereum in 2013 with its general-purpose programmable blockchain promised to introduce a new paradigm of Internet-based applications. At that moment, enthusiasts anticipated that the application of this new technology would revolutionize multiple fields from finance to healthcare to the public sector, to name but a few. During the s...

Blockchain technology enables new kinds of decentralized systems. Thus, it has often been advocated as a “disruptive” technology that could have the potentiality of reshaping political, economic, and social relations, “solving” problems like corruption, power centralization, and distrust toward political institutions. Blockchain has been gradually...

This paper presents a systematic literature review of the integration of ontologies into the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) development process. The review extracted data from 34 primary studies dealing with ontologies in the blockchain domain. DAO has become a key concept for the development of blockchain-based decentralized software...

Blockchain technology enables new kinds of decentralized systems. Thus, it has often been advocated as a 'disruptive' technology that could have the potentiality of reshaping political, economic and social relations, "solving" problems like corruption, power centralization and distrust towards political institutions. Blockchain has been gradually g...

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...

Digital work is organizationally, interpretively, spatially, and temporally complex. An array of innovative methodologies have begun to emerge to capture these activities, whether through re-purposing existing tools, devising entirely novel methods, or mixing old and new. This book brings together some of these techniques in one volume as a sourceb...

New ways of working in distributed platforms and collaborative communities rely on the ongoing cultivation of a special spirit to facilitate collective action, serendipitous encounters, and knowledge creation. However, depletion of spirit is frequently observed. It results from challenges involved with increasing scale, participatory governance, co...

Online version at http://journal.b-pro.org/article/affordances-of-decentralised-technologies-for-commons-based-governance/

See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440211002526

See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440211002526

Nearly a decade after the publication of the white paper in which Bitcoin and Blockchain came to light (Nakamoto, 2008), there remains a need to understand whether the key technical properties introduced by Blockchain, such as decentralisation, inmutatibility and transparency, do indeed offer transformative capacities. For example, could they foste...

Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other without a traditional hierarchical organisation to produce common and public goods, such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux. There is a need to understand how these communities govern and organise themselves as they grow...

The lack of clear boundaries and the distributed nature of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) pose a challenge for the theoretical frameworks which aim to provide a useful methodological tool for its conceptualisation and analysis, such as Activity Theory (AT). This paper presents the use of AT in the ongoing study of the organisational dynamics...

Contribution is a key element of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) communities. This element becomes of even more relevance for those communities focused on the production of digital commons, which typically possess the characteristics of an economy of contribution, rather than an economy of gift (Wittel, 2013), as in the case of the Free/Libre...

The aim of this research consists of extracting a set of insights related to the dynamics, group decision making procedures, motivations to contribute and mechanisms employed in the coordination of Commons-Based Peer Production communities, using as a case study the community responsible for the development of the Free/Libre Open Source Software Dr...