Mathieu O'Neil’s scientific contributions

Blockchains are aggregated and distributed databases: shared, chained, and immutable registries that conflate the production of digital tokens with their circulation. At their most basic level, they are technologies for keeping account, or records, of some form of activity, hence they are part of a long lineage of storing data, from clay tablets to bookkeeping. On a technical level, blockchains are peer‐to‐peer (P2P) structures for distributing and storing data. This chapter begins with a historical consideration of the emergence of peer production, including a reevaluation of the work of Yochai Benkler. It shows that peer production was given coherence as a model of production by being contrasted with two other modes (hierarchies and markets) and through the lens of Benkler's economic liberalism. The chapter distinguishes between four moments or aspects of blockchain initiatives that configure peers in different ways: peer production, peer development, peer governance, and peer exchange.

In this chapter on makers, the authors provide a critical overview of the different cultures of making, their motivations as well as the socio technical infrastructures that encourage these forms of peer production. They draw on a growing body of scholarship on making and hacking in the social sciences, in human‐computer interaction, as well as in arts and design research. Under the premise of one of making's central commitments, the democratization of technology production, ongoing interest rests to some extent on the possibility of empowerment and emancipation of a passive consumer society: “[M]aking challenges whether there is a gap between designers and engineers on the one hand, and between designers and end users on the other”. Studies on characteristics of communities for making and their cultures draw upon ethnographic research of mostly single shared machine shops or multi‐sited examinations within one geographical location.

To set the groundwork for understanding cultures of peer production, this chapter argues that it is necessary to see that peer production is, by and large, a form of cultural production. It also argues that the cultures of peer production projects will tend to be characterized by autonomy, meritocracy, openness, and inspiration. Field theory helps us to see how peer production projects are situated in broader structures of power. The chapter discusses the autonomy of peer production projects and their position within larger fields of software and media production, or what might be described as a larger field of “tech” or the field of new media production. The distinction of peer production projects is closely related to core values and assumptions. The chapter discusses openness as a key value and disposition within peer production cultures, elaborating on this with examples such as Wikipedia's “good faith collaboration”.

Commons‐based peer production is a socio‐economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Before turning to an analysis of the relationship between the emergence of peer production and virtue, it is important to underscore one further central characteristic of peer production. The best‐known examples of commons‐based peer production are the tens of thousands of successful free software projects that have come to occupy the software development market. The central thesis of this chapter is that socio‐technical systems of commons‐based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods but serve as a context for positive character formation. Exploring and substantiating these claims will be the authors' quest, but they begin with a brief tour through this strange and exciting new landscape of commons‐based peer production and conclude with recommendations for public policy.

The new materialism is useful for understanding the dependencies of hacker cartography begin with the technologies and physical realities that make these assemblages possible. The four examples in this chapter – Global Positioning System (GPS), 3D robotics, OpenStreetMap, and indigenous countermapping – tell a different story, not one of hacker freedom but hacker dependency upon costly and opaque infrastructures: GPS‐enabled systems, manufactured atmospheric platforms like satellites and/or drones, and proprietary and capitalized software. The chapter illustrates how a new materialist approach to hacker cartography shows how participatory mapping projects evolve with networked forms of technological power. Technological power manifests in the form of the state in the GPS case, corporations in the examples of OpenStreetMap and DIY Drones, and through traditional forms of domination in Indonesian countermapping.

In this chapter, the authors summarize current research on user and peer motivations in peer production systems, focusing on the following: individual motivations to participate, selection of tasks, and participation in peer production as a social practice, which influences motivations and highlights the critical role of institutions in enabling peer production. Generally, surveys have identified a diverse set of motivations for starting and continuing engagement in peer production spanning intrinsic, internalized extrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Social practices frame peer production as a school of virtue in which norms, attitudes, and standards are concurrently being created with the internal goods themselves. Peer production becomes a lifestyle. Most individuals will be consumers and free‐riders of commons‐based peer production systems. Still, in many cases and under the right conditions enough peers can be motivated to achieve impressive output.

One of the early challenges for any peer production collective is how to govern the growth of new members or contributors. Scope growth was not a topic of concern when scholars were focused on understanding the emergence of peer production collectives as a phenomenon and on identifying the conditions enabling their growing prevalence. But, with the emergence of peer production communities addressing domains as diverse as problem solving at NASA; to engaging in other innovative and technical endeavors, the time has come to treat the topic of scope growth with the import it deserves. Scope growth is important to understanding the current and future challenges that maturing peer production collectives face for several reasons. Governance rights offer participants the opportunity to make decisions that affect the participation architecture, or the social, legal, and technical capabilities that guide interactions and exchange in a collective.

Over the last decade, a number of progressive social movements around the world have embraced peer‐production principles such as collaboration, co‐production, and self‐organization. Technological innovation has radically altered the dynamics of organized collective action, promoting novel ways to engage in peer production and to mobilize peer production for social change. This chapter investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer production reshuffles and "remediates" social change activism today. 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.

The regulation of peer production projects is usually achieved by the users themselves. Ideally, this self‐organization and self‐management depend on shared social norms and rules. This chapter provides an overview and comparison of peer production's institutions, traces their origins, and describes their implications for cooperation and governance. It charts and discusses rules and norms as potentially conducive "forms of closure" in peer production. The chapter asks why peer production needs any sort of rules and norms. Based on this discussion of institutional conditions, it maps what sorts of rules and norms prevail in peer production. The chapter delineates the three institutional levels of policies, guidelines, and basic normative understandings that are geared towards the products and the processes of peer production. Next, it examines how rules and norms come into existence and are made to function. Finally, the chapter reflects to what end peer production's institutions congeal into governance regimes, bureaucracy, and hierarchies.

This chapter focuses on India to give an overview of postcolonial peer production (PCPP) and shows how the bazaar model provides an alternative perspective to peer production. It also focuses on the important strands that make a historical study and contemporary analysis of PCPP possible. The chapter presents bazaar‐level innovation and organizational structure as a unique bottom‐up model of peer production. It provides a brief political history of the Indian context to show why a particular type of PCPP emerged. The chapter develops the traditions of popular wisdom and embodied knowledge as open repositories for non‐elites to learn and tinker with technological products. It analyzes the bazaars side by side with traditional bases of popular knowledge, as a way to carve out historical roots and bring out their essence. The chapter moves into a more specific discussion on peer communities, particularly through a focus on money, creativity, and modes of organization.