[ecrea] CfP, Journal of Peer Production: "Value and Currency in Peer Production"

The Journal of Peer Production CFP: Value and Currency in Peer Production

The marriage of cryptography and the dynamics of open-source have now
produced a working distributed currency system. Bitcoin, as the most
notable example, can be understood as a new technics of exchange
inspired by the animal spirits of crypto-libertarianism. Whether or
not there is a place for currency -- and therefore exchange and
(economic) value -- in the utopian visions of commons-oriented thought
is contested. Meanwhile, hybrid forms like Bitcoin are developing
unhindered by their constitutional paradoxes. Capitalism, after all,
equally thrives atop what David Graeber has called a “baseline” or
“everyday” communism. Current developments of digital currencies are
pervaded by a number of issues: Who or what issues the money? What is
the source of the collective agreement to concede value? What forms of
control are coded into currency systems and who is guiding processes
of (re)design? Who plays the role of guarantor when a currency is
decentralized? And what role does trust play in all these issues? Has
crypto-mathematics transformed trust into a technical quality of a
system?

The flipside of this issue is value: The intensification and extension
of computational procedures, which is manifested most clearly in the
rise of big data, has lead to a proliferation of bottom-up procedures
to formalise “values”, rendering them easily calculable and lending
order to the decentralised world of peers. Wikipedia contributors, for
example, have long awarded each other “barnstars” for valued service
in a range of areas, and the site has long explored ways of rating
article quality. In place of managerial commands and bureaucratic
hierarchies we have Karma points, ranking systems, reputation metrics
and the long-tail logic of networks. Order in this sense is iterative,
recursive and topological.

This issue of The Journal of Peer Production invites contributions on
the themes of value and currency as they relate to peer production.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

    Decentralised and crypto-currencies;
    Non-coercive taxation systems and/or experiments/experiences;
    Analog/pre-digital (or historical) networks for distributed value exchange;
    Currency and design;
    Currencies and the commons;
    Life after fiat (the becoming-uncertain of taxes);
    What does/should peer production value?;
    Re-thinking the constitution of value;
    Theories of non-monetary value and worth;
    The relationship between valuing practices and project hierarchies;
    Forms of belief in peer production;
    Automated systems of ranking and distributing value;
    Theories of exchange, gift and voluntarism;
    Trust and anonymity in the building of value;
    Intermediation and “guarantees” in P2P exchanges.

Submission proposals of under 500 words due by 28 January 2013.
Accepted submissions notified during February and full papers
(approximately between 4,000 and 10,000 words) due by 22 July 2013.
All article submissions are peer reviewed according to JoPP review
policies.




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