[Commlist] CFP: Journal of Peer Production #15 Transition

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CFP: Journal of Peer Production #15 TRANSITION

/// Peer production and our crises

Peer producers are people who create and manage common-pool resources 
together. It sometimes seems as if “peer production” and “digital 
commons” can be used interchangeably. Digital commons such as free and 
open source software and Wikipedia are non-rivalrous (they can be 
reproduced at little or no cost) and non-excludable (no-one can prevent 
others from using them, through property rights for example). So, 
practically speaking, proprietary objects could be produced by equal 
“peers”. We argue that peer production has a normative dimension so that 
what chiefly characterizes this mode of production is  that “the  output 
is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the 
commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production” 
(Söderberg & O'Neil, 2014, p. 2). The Journal of Peer Production has 
tracked the evolution of peer production from open knowledge to open 
design and manufacturing. It approaches its ten-year anniversary in the 
time of the global pandemic, and of the continuing environmental crisis. 
The impacts of Covid-19 are profound, but will not last forever, though 
local infection pools may subsist in poorer countries for much longer 
than in the Global North. In contrast, the environmental crisis is here 
to stay.

/// The role of the Journal of Peer Production

Significant social change is required to stave off climate destruction, 
and principles such as cooperation and trust, transparency in 
production, collective democratic decision-making, etc., can usefully 
contribute to necessary processes of “relocalization” and “degrowth”.* 
What should be done to develop the digital and physical commons? What 
role should the Journal of Peer Production play in this development? And 
what shape should it take? It is clear that in addition to maintaining 
its uniquely transparent curation and dissemination of academic 
research, the Journal of Peer Production needs to expand its work in 
several ways:

-Should it feature more practical advice to develop commons, such as 
toolkits and how-to guides?
-Should it comprise policy proposals to help grow the infrastructure 
which supports the commons?
-In other words, should it combine research and action?

The answer is 'yes' in all three cases. To this end we seek creative, 
practical and policy-oriented ideas to help invent a new type of 
scientific journal that both fulfills strict academic criteria, and 
brings research work closer to practice. Our next issue, JOPP #15 will 
thus be a "TRANSITION" issue featuring, in addition to peer-reviewed 
research, experimental formats and "meta" articles.

JOPP #15 TRANSITION - Call for Papers
We seek investigations into societal transition (how can we move towards 
a society where contributions to the commons are valued and 
recognised?), into the journal's editorial transition (how should the 
Journal of Peer Production change to assist this societal transition), 
as well as idiosyncratic understandings of scientific and political 
transitions.

JOPP #15 TRANSITION - Peer-reviewed articles + Complement
We invite submissions of peer-reviewed academic papers from multiple 
fields on how "things can change". What are the sociological and 
historical conditions for transition to occur? For example: what is the 
impact of manifestos? When is innovation socialised? How can allies be 
enrolled? etc.
Editorial guidelines for peer-reviewed articles: max 8000 words; 
peer-reviewed in accordance with the JOPP peer review process 
[http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/]
For this TRANSITION issue, academic papers must be complemented by a 
shorter piece in which the contents of the academic paper are 
transformed into a different format. The nature of this transformation 
is up to the authors.
We can suggest the following: policy guidelines; practical toolkits; 
comic-books; etc.
Other authors may be enlisted to assist in the article's transition.
Editorial guidelines for complementary pieces: max 2000 words; reviewed 
by the editors.

JOPP #15 TRANSITION - Non peer-reviewed articles
We also invite submissions of non-peer reviewed academic papers dealing 
with transition. These will be reviewed by the editors.

A-Follow-up papers
Papers "following-up" on previous issues of JOPP, or on specific 
articles by the authors or others.
What has changed since this article was published?

B-Policy and strategic papers
Papers bringing together academics and policy makers.
Strategies for connecting to actors in government and/or civil society.

C-Meta papers
Papers on the question of impactful academic publishing: how can 
academics pursue a career and have social impact at the same time?
Papers on the transition of research fields: how do research fields 
evolve to better meet their aims?
Rewriting influential papers, or a chapter of a classic book, or 
revisiting one's own past paper: what has changed?

Editorial guidelines for A, B, and C: max 4000 words.

TRANSITION: TIMELINE
CFP released 30 June 2020
EOI peer-reviewed articles deadline (500-words max. extended abstract + 
100-words max. complementary paper abstract) 30 July 2020
EOI non peer-reviewed articles deadline (250-words max. abstract) 30 
July 2020
Authors advised 30 August 2020
First submission sent out for review 30 November 2020
Reviews due 30 January 2021
Revised submissions due 30 March 2021
Signals due 30 May 2021
JOPP # 15 released 30 June 2021

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*The following is an excerpt from the final chapter of the forthcoming 
Handbook of Peer Production (Wiley, 2021), “Be Your Own Peer! Principles 
and Policies for the Commons” (O’Neil, Toupin, Pentzold):

The governance of peer produced projects, one of the central aspects of 
the studies of peer production, aspires to the self-regulation of 
participants in autonomous collectives. This governance raises the 
broader issue of political sovereignty. The appeal of self-governance 
for peer production participants can perhaps be explained by the amount 
of strategic control most citizens in liberal democracies have over 
their lives and environment. This control has been drastically reduced 
by unaccountable global actors – e.g. financial markets, extractive 
industrial interests, supranational trade agreements, and the list goes 
on – who influence and constrain the policy options of notionally 
democratic nation-states. In the early 2020s, racist nativism and 
authoritarianism are being embraced by some people in reaction to the 
failures of export-oriented, deregulated, and globalized neoliberalism. 
A way out of this political crisis is linked to a solution to the 
environmental crisis: we must head toward more democracy by relocalizing 
or deglobalizing, and towards more sustainability by degrowing, our 
economies.

As engaged researchers, we believe the Handbook of Peer Production needs 
to offer a response, however modest, to these political and ecological 
challenges. Addressing the macro-economic aspects of “deglobalization” 
would lead us far away from peer production, towards issues which would 
probably require a Handbook of their own.  Accordingly, we focus here on 
relocalization as it relates to degrowth (décroissance), the downscaling 
of over-production and over-consumption (Kallis, 2019; Latouche, 2006). 
In a nutshell: unlimited growth and consumption are not sustainable, so 
we need more access to free public services, a shorter work week, and a 
turn towards climate-friendly industries. In this context, Stefania 
Barca (2019) suggests that the one question that matters is that posed 
by self-governing workers: “should surplus value be reinvested in 
production, or not”? Yet since only a handful of firms and industrial 
sectors are run following so-called “holacratic” (i.e., communal or 
participatory) principles, degrowth must – in a first stage at least – 
be deployed in a piecemeal, hybrid manner.

In the context of discussing the cooperative sector, Gibson-Graham 
(2003) suggest that if we perceive economic relations as already plural, 
then the revolutionary “project of replacement” can be modified into one 
of “strengthening already existing non-capitalist economic processes and 
building new non-capitalist enterprises,” of establishing “communal 
subjects” (p. 157). Several chapters in the Handbook of Peer Production 
[...] have discussed ways in which this “strengthening” has begun to 
occur at the municipal level. However, as noted by Adrian Smith (2014) 
in his account of London’s early-1980s Technology Networks 
(community-based workshops which provided open access to shared machine 
tools, technical advice, and prototyping services), a “key lesson from 
this history is that “radical aspirations invested in workshops, such as 
democratizing technology, will need to connect to wider social 
mobilizations capable of bringing about reinforcing political, economic 
and institutional change” (Smith, 2014, online). In other words, the 
ecology around peer production must be nurtured. Further, adopting 
strictly local settings leaves the public policy terrain open to 
neoliberal and/or reactionary perspectives.

References

Barca, S. (2019) The labor(s) of degrowth. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 
30(2), 207–216.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism 
and class. Critical Sociology. 29(2): 123-164.

Kallis, G. (2019) Socialism without growth. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 
30(2): 189-206.

Latouche, S. (2006) The globe downshifted. Le monde diplomatique. January.
https://mondediplo.com/2006/01/13degrowth

Smith, A. (2014) Technology Networks for socially useful production. 
Journal of Peer Production, 5: Shared Machine Shops. 
http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/peer-reviewed-articles/technology-networks-for-socially-useful-production/

Söderberg, J., & O’Neil, M. (2014). Introduction. In: Söderberg, J., & 
Maxigas (Eds.), Book of Peer Production (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press. 
http://peerproduction.net/projects/books/book-of-peer-production/




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