Abstract: The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian global togetherness, for a new communism born through the new generation of tools and organizational practices, have temporarily been appropriated and hi-jacked by capitalism under the Open Source and to an extent Creative Commons movements. Through and with [...]]]>

Abstract: The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian global togetherness, for a new communism born through the new generation of tools and organizational practices, have temporarily been appropriated and hi-jacked by capitalism under the Open Source and to an extent Creative Commons movements. Through and with the Open Process methods of the founding Internet communities, we can make a significant step towards claiming it back. Commu(o)nism, we could call it, is a new emerging form of communism hacked with open process and new commons. The small (o) in the middle stands for open.

Introduction

For the last ten years, the world has been misled. We were lead to believe that the key attribute of cooperation amongst networking and software communities since 1960’s has been that the source code is open. The term to describe it, Open Source, has become synonymous with this idea. The name, and the concept behind it, has captured the imagination in many areas (Category:Open – P2P Foundation). To name just couple of larger, more influential examples in academia, and politics: Open Access, Open Science, and Obama’s pledge for Open Government (Obama 2009).

Open Source was re-applied across society mostly through two aspects. Primarily it is to mean that the final product has to be open (Open Access). In some cases, first aspect was accompanied with the second one, usually through a commitment to transparency and participation (Open Government). Re-applications of the Open Source paradigm that mention in more detail HOW is the second aspect, commitment to transparency and participation, going to be achieved, what are its principles, mechanism, processes and safeguards, are missing.

This is no coincidence. Beyond its founding analysis, Open Source never defined itself through a set of principles that would ensure open processes in cooperation. Instead, it is a narrow, business, for-profit focused subset of the volunteer driven cooperative model that gave us hacking, Free Software, open protocols, the Internet and the Web. It is for this reason that modelling other open systems and concepts throughout society on Open Source results in missing the most important aspects of the model.

It was ethics, in Free Software (FS), and a set of defined and respected open processes, in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that were at the centre of those communities and their inventions. I propose we call this collection of practices and principles the Internet Model.

To benefit from the ground breaking cooperative methodology of the software and networking communities, we need to think about them, and about their contributions, in a new way. A way that will not be composed of a selective choice according to what suits capitalism and private interests. On the contrary, a way that will make open-process volunteer cooperation that has developed outside and despite of capitalism and institutional bureaucracy and coercive labour, central to it.

It was openness of the processes of cooperation that was the key attribute of communities and their inventions. Hence, I propose we name it the Open Process.

No hidden status: open process computing and politics

From its earliest days in 1959, to the recent generation of hackers (Lakhani and Wolf 2003), hacking meant to enjoy doing something (Levy 1984, 23). To improve on anything, hackers had to know how something works, so that it can be taken apart, improved on and reassembled in new ways. Any obstacle to this procedure of learning and creation was undesirable (Levy 1984, 40). Bureaucracies of any kind, corporate, government or university, were the worst enemy, since they invoke arbitrary rules – a total contrast to the world hackers were building (Levy 1984, 41). For hackers, the world would be a better place if other approached it “with the same inquisitive intensity, scepticism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness in sharing accomplishments, urge to make improvements” (Levy 1984, 48). Writing a program was “building a community, not churning out a product” (Levy 1984, 56).

It is a striking parallel that close to the birth of hacking, probably the most innovative and the most important programming language was born too. Lisp was first implemented between 1958 and 1962. Some of its key unique properties were recursion, function type (you can store function in variables, passed as arguments), and “the whole language there all the time” (Graham 2004, 188). This last feature is of the special importance: a running program can be interrupted, examined, state changed, and execution resumed. It embodied that “there was no hidden status anywhere” (Williams 2002, 49), a characteristic praised by Richard Stallman when talking about Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), an early operating system he used in the famous MIT lab.
A user, hacker, could intervene at any point in the process of program execution. This way, not only that “the entire act of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust”, the structure of ITS was “built to foster this spirit of openness” (Williams 2002, 53). The process is open for being changed, hacking at any stage. These two features, i claim, are at the heart of the hacking spirit, and since they offer a new organizational paradigm, a new model, political consequences of their re-application in new organizational contexts could be immense. Open process and trust: trust in the ability and desire of people to participate in political, economic and juridical tasks, and openness of the processes for participation to be possible.

If we transfer this feature of an operating system (ITS), or a computer language (Lisp) into the political sphere, it would mean complete openness of the source materials and all processes through which materials go, to all interested parties. In practice, in UK, on the level of local councils, it would mean that a resident could have insight in all the work of political bodies. Committees, key places for decision making, are open to citizens. However, whatever a council committee deems secretive gets closed down, and citizens have to leave the meetings when such matters are discussed and documents presented. This limited, selective openness shows both distrust in citizens and reveals what is the overriding founding principle of the liberal democratic order. When processes are closed for local citizens whenever they need to be open for maximizing private profit through commercial interests, we can say that the founding principle of the system is the idea of private property, right to acquire it and gain power over other members of the community based on it.

The source of distrust and founding principle are the same like in the case of Open Source, commercial interests and private profit. In the local council case, in the name of commercial interests, documents containing anything to do with an external private contractor can be, and mostly are, kept secret. Citizens are cut out, the logic of secrecy so central to private accumulation of wealth is imposed. In the case of Open Source, mandate to return any improvements to the distributed code is removed. Again, the logic of secrecy, or market advantage and potential private profit gained by it, is made supreme. Secrecy is essential to the logic of private profit and it goes against open participation, and hence against the possibility of directly participatory democratic systems.

Let us not forget that IBM and Intel, amongst many others, did not believe that anyone would want a small computer (Levy 1984, 189). Steve Jobs’ predictions about the sales of first Apple computer were not much better: he asked one of his components suppliers for a “high volume” order, of fifty units a month. Several years later, the supplier estimated he sold four hundred thousand of those units (Levy 1984, 261). This reminds me of the answer i get when i talk about open process participation of people in political, economic and juridical daily tasks, a new form of direct democracy across key aspect of society: ‘no one cares, no one will be interested’ is the most common remark i get. As the cases of personal computing, electronic networking, e-mail, short message service (SMS) , or social networking confirm, humans embrace new ways of getting in touch with each other beyond what the creators of new ways expect.

The spirit of direct action was another key trait that is essential for reuse in political sphere, dropped by the Open Source paradigm. For Stallman, the link seems to be clear, he saw 19th century slavery abolitionist John Brown a historical figure analogous to himself (Williams 2002, 183). Famously, when there were physical barriers to access, hackers resorted to analysing locks during night time incursions in offices, climbing through ceiling structures, creating blank and master keys, and gaining access to whatever they needed: they “did not bother with such ridiculous concepts such as property rights”, and they didn’t steal nor injure anyone in the process (Levy 1984, 102-107). Mischief was prevented through social pressures enforcing an ethic of improvements and not damage (Levy 1984, 63). This spirit can still be seen at hacker gatherings in the form of The Open Organization of Lockpickers holding there their events regularly (TOOOL 2010).

Volunteer cooperation and communities for all

Networking and software communities that were central to construction of the Internet, the Web and their tools consisted mostly of hackers, engineers and academics. Let us call them the founding communities.

Their political importance does not derive from the results and processes of their work alone. The key political ingredients are their methods of cooperation and most of all consistently repeated claim that technological advances should benefit all. For one, life should be less machine alike for all humans (Himanen 2001, 33), and self-organization of work and time should be part of it.

Freedom to self-organize the time that hackers demand for everyone started in academia. While in the Middle Ages work was task oriented, industrialization and the factory imposed time based (Himanen 2001, 35-6), controlled, or as we learned to call it in the 20th century, managed work. Since information technology tools enabling new forms of cooperation have become widely available, we could go back to the task based work. This is especially the case for the latest generation of Web software enabling creation and tracking of working groups and tasks, collective project management and all the corresponding communication.

If repurposed for the specific context, these tools and new forms of cooperation could be utilized across society, in other spheres of production, politics, law, education. Yet, there is no guarantee that any of it will happen. Quite the contrary, the new wave of tools is used to increase the control over workers under the conditions of time based work (Himanen 2001, 37). Currently, the key assumption is that there are only a few people in any organization mature enough to take decisions. Majority of us are deemed incapable of it, and regardless of the rapid technological changes and the possibilities they open, most people are condemned to obedience (Himanen 2001, 39). Hacker desire to share for all, across society, not just software, but as well their forms of cooperation and work, has a long way to go to materialize.

Contrary to the widely held idea, it can be argued that it was software and networking communities in academic research centres, those founding communities, which seized USA Department of Defence projects and funds and developed the Web and the Internet without direct military direction (Castells 2001, 1975). Our challenge today is that technological revolutions do not come without large cultural transformation, they have to be thought of. This does not happen incrementally. It requires “a vision, and act of belief, a gesture of rebellion” – attributes not directly ascribed, but well applicable to Richard Stallman’s work. At the core of the wave of new tools and practices are distribution of processing capacity and increase of innovation potential by cooperation and sharing. Hacker culture was central to it. Hence, to reap the benefits of the revolutionary leap in technology, new organizations have to be built on hacker culture (Castells 2001, 177).

Open Source movement is an attempt to use the innovation potential for the benefit of private profit, for capitalist goals, which, as i’m attempting to demonstrate here, clashes with the most important features of hacker culture. Yet, long before the Open Source movement was formed, many hackers went on to form companies that became large corporations, adopting their hacker traits to fit the purpose (Thomas 2003, XXII).

The goal of this text is to twofold: one, to show how Open Source limits reuse, adoption of hacker culture, of new forms of cooperation, in spheres other than the capitalist economy. Two, how a new concept could remove those limits and open up the possibilities for reuse. For that to happen, for new organizations to have a chance of being built on an adopted form of hacker culture, or for the existing ones to be rebuilt, to be hacked by it, we need a more precise definition of what is the hacker culture, or cultures.

As i have developed elsewhere, key attributes of the founding communities have been formalized best in the IETF and Free Software (Prug 2009). We could summarize them: one, a goal to create something that is shareable – making profit can only be a secondary goal. Two, open participation – anyone can join, based on enjoyment of work – and open processes and results of work. Three, core activity is base on volunteering, working groups and competence. Four, rough consensus and running code decision making principle is the norm, voting is used only in rare and extreme circumstances. Five, responsibilities are defined, to note some examples: for IETF it is protocol ownership, for FS software maintainer, for Debian GNU/Linux operating system package maintainer. Six, rights are based on contributions – in Open Organizations project, we called this implementation work (Geer, Malter, and Prug 2005). Roots of this principle are visible in the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, the earliest hacker community we know of, where keys to the main room were given to new members, new hackers, only after they completed forty hours of work (Levy 1984, 21). Many authors also hold that having a trusted benevolent dictator is a key aspect(Coffin 2006), i do not share this view.

I proposed that we could describe the model in short with the following formula: the Internet Model = FS + IETF, software + networking, or ethics + organization.

My claim is that organizations implementing these processes would benefit in several ways. Structure and visibility of tasks, processes and work done to complete them will be clearer, which contributes to easier recognition of the workers who contribute most work that matters to the organization. As a result of this visibility, focus on implementation work and continuously carried out processes will increase, which keeps organization alive and developing. Project management will become easier, while decision making will be placed into the hands of those who matter most, who contribute most to the implementation work, work whose progress defines the organization and ensures its continual existence. All of this will attract new volunteers and reduce impact of the existing counter-productive internal participants. First attempt at a more detailed development of this model – set in a concrete, mostly cooperative production context – is in my paper Open Process Academic Publishing.

Today, given the structure of organizations across society, given our time based obligations to work place, and our waged labour, it is no surprise that it is difficult to see how could these new processes of work, this hacker culture, especially its volunteer aspect, be applicable. MySQL is one of the two most important Free Software databases, and one of the most used databases in the world. Sun, a large corporation founded in 1980-s also by an earlier generation of hackers, bought MySQL company in 2008. Two key MySQL hackers were unhappy with how the work was going under Sun, and they decided to leave and form their own company (Moody 2009). What differentiates them is a hacking business model (Greant and Widenius 2009) under which their new company operates: workers have wide array of rights derived from hacker culture, with a mixture of rules that seem to share some spirit of the self-management in Socialist Yugoslavia, combined with a typical capitalist company. This could be a one-off experiment. It could also be the start of a new generation of hackers financially empowered by their hacking, not ready any more to operate under the terms imposed on them by the form of capitalist firms that clash with hacker ethics and culture.

The Internet Model and the Open Process are attempts to conceptualize and appropriately name the ways of working which brought us the Internet and the Web. Ways in which hackers, academics and software and networking engineers, or the founding communities as i call them, played, and still play, a central, constitutive, role. Due to its focus on attracting capitalist investors under terms which included leaving many hacker culture features out, Open Source failed to be a concept through which a comprehensive reapplication of those ways of working across the rest of society would be possible. To make the reapplication possible, we need new concepts. Hence the Open Process and the Internet Model.

Open Source as a capitalist ideological castration

Adopting new terms for an important and widely spread concept is a difficult task. It does not help either that financial power behind Open Source and associated business interest is enormous. Public imagination was captured with the 2001 IBM announcement that they are investing 1000 million US dollars in Linux development. IBM was convinced that “Linux can do for business applications what the Internet did for networking and communications’, which will ‘make computing easier and free from proprietary operating systems’” (Wilcox 2000).

This type of business reaction was precisely what Open Source founders were looking for. In their open source “re-labelling”, their primary, publicly stated goal, was to attract business (Raymond 1998). To make hackers’ software and networking communities and their products look like a good place to invest vast sums of money. In short, Open Source was primarily a business pitch to the world’s largest IT corporations. We know that the goal of capitalist economic organizations is to make profit through exploitation and domination, through coercion of both workers and political organizations (lobbying, corruption).

Open Source initiative and for-profit organizations have been incredibly successful in appropriating only aspects of software and networking communities’ unique cooperation that suit them. However, every such appropriation is a closure of other possibilities. Given the dominance of capitalist relations, it is most often a removal of what does not fit its core logic of domination and exploitation for profit. Tracing the processes of these appropriations is necessary to evaluate what was left out, or added, to construct a capitalist, profit making suitable concept, like Open Source.

If we look at the various stages of cooperation in software and network communities, although many successful businesses were setup by the members of those communities, we will not see explicit claims, nor implicitly expressed desires, to make profit, nor to exploit or dominate. Quite the contrary, we can see claims to create, to be playful (Stallman 2002b; Levy 1984, 184, 202, 208), to do it with others, collectively  through open processes, open to both participation and with a shared final result (H. Alverstrand 2004). Although corporations have been integrating these elements as desirable aspects of work culture (Fleming 2009, 56-76), they are still not the attributes that would be welcome in a typical corporation, especially not in the Open Source founding days in 1998. This is why Open Source appropriation of this history, in its focus on attracting capital and top corporate decision makers, had to exclude elements unacceptable to for-profit capitalist model.

Since large scale controlled cooperation is the fundamental form of capitalist production (Marx 1990, 453-4), it was to be expected that aspects of the Internet Model will be attractive to capitalist organization of labour. When a business friendly subset, Open Source, was offered, a fast rate of adoption was a logical follow up.

A surprising result of this research which i did not foresee, was that Free Software principles, although central and far more truthful than Open Source to the Internet Model, still do not bode well enough on their own to describe innovative cooperation through which the Internet and its most important tools were built.

While the work of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) were one of the key components in the development of what i call the Internet Model, Open Source was an act of capitalist ideological castration. What was potent – what gave life to tools and practices of software and networking communities – was removed, in favour of commitment to the capitalist ideology.

The essential parts of that ideology are: time based wage labour; strictly hierarchical management with no say for those who do the implementation work (although, capitalism is trying to incorporate other models to adjust to what workers want while still have them obey); closed information, trade secrets, reward (wage) secrets; enforced (not volunteer) cooperation through closed processes; selfishness and strictly for-profit motivation; clash of inter-organizational limited open processes and cooperation (employees have to cooperate within the departments they work in) with overall selfishness, overall closed processes and for-profit motivation; active prevention of sharing of what could and should be shared in the name of private profit for the tiny minority (formulas to produce drugs for life threatening diseases being denied to poorer states are the best example), use of technology to increase machine-like time for humans (i.e Fordism with improved machinery and better control over humans in production). The list is long, and the contradictions between the necessary cooperation and non-cooperation are many.

All of the above characteristics are contrary to, and in clash with, many key aspects of the hacker culture. All of it had to be not mentioned, or obfuscated, in order for the Open Source initiative to sound right, sound true. But its truth lies only within the perspective of capitalism and especially within its neo-liberal free-market ideological doctrine. From the perspective of the hacker culture, capitalist ideology and its Open Source initiative, show the necessity of hacker politics.
However, as some might incorrectly conclude here from my remarks, the opposite is not directly true. A truth of hacker culture known to me cannot be easily identified nor placed within the politics of egalitarian ideologies and movements. Yet, there is a lot of shared ideological ground. Far more than it is the case with ideological forms of capitalism. Such comparison requires a separate study.

For now, i would like to point out that i believe that centralization, closeness and secrecy of socialist and communist practices were specific to the historic period in which they originated. The theoretical and ideological base from which these practices were derived from has many principles and beliefs similar to those exhibited in the hacker culture, and to an extent in hacker politics too – FS being an example of it. This was manifest in the socialist states, where sharing of education, health and housing were widely implemented. In socialist Yugoslavia, the principle of self-management brought the system a step closer to key elements of hacker culture.

I can imagine how a new generation of political principles and organizational tools for movements, activist and state forms, could be built consistently with vast majority of the Open Process and the Internet Model principles, with the hacker culture. A new hybrid political ideology, merging of anarchism and communism based on the technological advances of our time, seems a good candidate and a logical way to proceed. In other words, hacking, anarchism and communism could be the basis for a new directly democratic and participatory egalitarian society without strong centralized hierarchies, based on open processes and volunteer cooperation (enjoying work) at its core. A society with common needs and interests – developed in heterogeneous ways suitable to both diversity and commonness – at its centre. I cannot see how a similar ideological proximity, between hacking and capitalism, could be claimed for the forms of capitalist ideology.

A stolen method enabled false claims of uniqueness

There were two central differentiating points made by the Open Source founders. One, that their new concept was unique in making conscious the method of cooperation which was until then a set of customs passed through the practice, the so called ‘bazaar model’. Two, that they were pragmatists, not interested in ideology.

In the three-year study (2005-2008) of a new vast shopping mall, Shopsville in Finland, Murtola describes what happens when critique is appropriated into what is being critiqued. First step is exclusion, separation, “some people are allowed to join, they are specifically selected as appropriate. Others are denied access”. Main decision makers are investors, capital holders:

The process of appropriation can be understood as divided into two stages. The first stage involves choosing a selective, desired part of something and abstracting that part from its social and historical context. The second stage involves inserting it into another context.(Murtola, 15)

My claim is here the following: Richard Stallman’s Free Software foundational ethical principles were his expression of community of software engineers, academics, hackers, to produces collaboratively, voluntarily, without the coercive mechanisms of capital, a non-democratic force imposed on everyone since the days of the industrial revolution. He saw normal state of professional programming work where we do it for the money, wanting to get away from it and forget it as fast as possible, as a tragedy (Williams 2002, 77). Open Source did precisely what Murtola says happens through appropriation: they choose selectively, ignoring key aspects, ethics (FS) and open-process (IETF), extracting parts they selected from the overall social and historic context and embedding them into the new one suitable to capitalist investors.

Early versions of Emacs, Stallman’s earliest software, state that they were “distributed on a basis of communal sharing” (Williams 2002, 85). He found a way for an easy addition of features without disrupting the whole. He shared the source widely, inspiring large number of people to contribute. In words of Hal Abelson, one of Stallman’s colleagues from the time: in a robust structure loose network was collaborating successfully, with Stallman “paving the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects” unlike anything done before (Williams 2002, 86). John Gilmore, a prominent hacker, believes that through GNU project “Stallman pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other”, and this may end up being his most important legacy (Williams 2002, 181).

Here we have precisely the invention of the method that Open Source initiative founders claimed differentiates their movement from Free Software. I guess because of open source initiative pressure, Stallman conceded that Open Source is a development methodology, while Free Software is a social movement with four essential freedoms (Stallman 2002a, 57). This, i claim, was a strategic mistake on Stallman’s part. It gave Open Source an advantage, through a false point of uniqueness that even for Raymond, if we read his texts closely, belonged at least as much to Stallman and older FS communities, as it did to a newer generation of hackers.

For Raymond, there were two broadly identifiable ideological positions amongst hackers, and variety of positions in between those two. First, one was ideological driven (FS), while the other one was pragmatist, not driven by an ideology (Raymond 2001, 67). Free Software was “historically the best organized and most visible part of hacker culture” (Raymond 2001, 68), since it

supported great deal of open-source development from 1980’s onward, including tools like Emacs and GCC which are still basic to the Internet open-source world, and seem likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. For many years the FSF was the single most important focus of open-source hacking, producing a huge number of tools still critical to the culture. The FSF was also long the only sponsor of open source with an institutional identity visible to outside observers of the hacker culture. (Raymond 2001, 69)

Note this well crafted ideological move: he calls everything open source couple of decades backwards, even though he is just in the process of inventing the term. Equally, he calls FSF a sponsor of open source, erasing from history that FSF supported Free Software, while implanting his fictitious construct that it supported open source, a non-existent term at the time. He continues: in July 1997, more than half of software in the largest and the most popular software archive in the world at the time carried FS General Public Licence (GPL). There were also pragmatist communities in 1980’s and 1990’s, mostly around Berkley Unix, users of BSD licence. However, they “failed to build bazaar communities of significant size, and became seriously fragmented and ineffective.”

In other words, Raymond agrees with widely held belief at the time: Free Software and its GPL copyleft way was a success, while what he calls a pragmatist approach was not. While explaining one of his “open source” principles (the importance of having users), Raymond used Emacs as a positive example of fast development in small cycles (Raymond 2001, 26-8). He thus confirmed what we knew already, as Abelson remarked, that frequent and early releases and cooperative development are models developed by Free Software communities. Yet, Raymond still proceeded and attributed falsely those features to his newly formed Open Source movement.

Emacs was and still is Free Software. Hence, features Raymond named and attributed to his newly founded movement, are the features of Free Software. Calling it something else, especially insisting that that else is based on methods of development invented by Free Software communities, is stealing and appropriating. In short, one of the key reasons why Free Software movement was successful is because it did well what Raymond stole from it and used it as his key argument to define Open Source: advanced methods of cooperation.

Raymond’s central point – point on which the whole reason for existence of Open Source hinges – the difference between the cathedral and bazaar model, is developed in a brief passage argued through Emacs as an example of cathedral style of development. He claimed that in 1992 he tried to merge large amount of Lisp libraries into Emacs, but he “run into political trouble and was largely unsuccessful” (Raymond 2001, 28). Stallman’s recollection of this was quite different. Raymond wanted to “take over the development of a large part of Emacs, operating independently”, while Stallman wanted to judge contributed ideas individually, accept some without being forced in accepting it all. This eventually led to Stallman “accepting substantial amount of Raymond’s work” (Wayner 2000, 113). For Raymond, this behaviour of Stallman was what made him characterize the development of Emacs as cathedral style, with a designer at the centre of the project.

With the appearance of Linux, a different, bazaar style of development appeared. However, Linus Torvalds’ style on which he insisted loudly and frequently on kernel email lists was that he will only apply small patches, that do one thing (Sowe and Stamelos 2007, 112). In other words, he was saying a very similar thing that Stallman told Raymond: changes have to be small, so that they can be selected easily by the project leader who made all the final decisions (Sowe and Stamelos 2007, 107). The process was almost identical, with one important difference: the frequency and pace of the application of incoming patches and releases was significantly, if not dramatically higher. Linus took the existing model and improved on it by speeding it up; this was his big contribution. Otherwise, very little else changed. Especially given that it is extremely rare that any software project attracts number of developers large enough to start functioning like the bazaar Raymond describes (Krishnamurthy 2002).

Distributed peer reviewing, add release early, release often, perhaps the two most important aspects claimed to have made Open Source unique (Raymond 2001), were aspects belonging to many hacker communities. Other than faster application of the cooperative model based on small patches, overall differences between the Free Software and Open Source was so small, that “as a development approach, the two F/OSS movements are indistinguishable” (Dedrick and West 2008, 436). Raymond’s Open Source was indeed a different political project, focused on dropping the GPL’s viral aspect and allowing corporations and institutions to keep their additions to the existing Free Software closed and not shared.

However, it was the invention of copyleft and GPL, work of FSF, and possibly most of all Stallman’s stubborn insistence on the importance of the key FS principles, which made aspects shared between the Free Software and Open Source widely spread and known.

With the rise of Linux, pragmatists finally had a success on their hands (Raymond 2001, 70). Even if this was the case, if Linux was a success of the pragmatist model, the model kept failing until that moment, as Raymond himself admitted comparing BSD’s relative failure, in comparison to GPL projects. Moreover, if so, surely those times, the history before Linux, were successful because of the Free Software, as Raymond also noted. Hence, it is a blatant misrepresentation to call it what it was not, Open Source. However, there is little doubt that success of the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux system, and subsequent Open Source marketing supported by ultra rich corporations, made some aspects of hacker culture and model of cooperation far more prominent.

It is incorrect to call the project a “rebranding exercise” of Free Software in Open Source (Moody 2001, 169). In rebranding, the brand changes in a given moment of time by those, in most cases who own it, while history is preserved. There is no negation of the previous brand, only the introduction of a new one. In rebranding, history is not rewritten. Finally, to start with, you need to have a brand. Free Software was never a brand. Brands are ways to market, categorize, position, and sell commodities, ways to limit the use of collection of attributes which constitute the brand, in other to make profit. Free Software was, and still is, a social movement. It came out of hacking communities, based on hacking culture.

Core hacking values do not fit in the for-profit, capitalist ideology and practice. Hence, Raymond and his group had to start from stripping attributes that do not fit, in order to have an object that can both fit capitalism and be commodified. Only such, new and suitable concept, could have been branded. Raymond created this new concept by rewriting and falsifying the history of Free Software. He negated it first through the creation of a new, hostile concept. He then proceeded to call its history, its products, methods and communities with a new name. The circle was complete. It was an act of ethical cleansing: it cleansed the community formed under the new concept from Free Software hackers and their ethics.

On practice and ideology

Open Source creation was not just a creation of a new concept. It was an extensively conceived project, and Raymond who took central part in it has shown to be a successful ideologue. Rejecting that the notion of ideology applies to you is a typical attribute of an ideology and an ideologue. Raymond’s beliefs are with free trade and forces of the market, which are, according to him, both opposed to coercion through ideology (Moody 2001, 153). There are two mistaken basic theoretically assumptions here. One, that there is non-ideological set of beliefs and practices (Žižek 1994, 17). And two, that free-trade and market forces are those non-ideological entities. Ian Murdoch, founder of Debian project, expressed similar neo-liberal ideological views:

“commoditization is a natural and unstoppable force that is good for everyone involved if that force is allowed to develop on its natural course” (DiBona, Stone, and Cooper 2005, 92).

These claims might have stood in the eyes of many prior to the 2008 banking crashes. However, it is clear now that it is only through the gigantic and swift state intervention that the capitalist financial sector has been saved from a total collapse. Let us be clear on this: Alister Darling, UK minister of finance at the time, spoke openly for the first time about the seriousness of the crisis in the summer of 2009. On that weekend in 2008, we were forty-eight hours away from the two of the four largest UK banks closing down its cash points and declaring bankruptcy [REF]. The state had no choice, but to intervene and pump as much money as it was needed to prevent this. No one, not to my knowledge, has spoken on the possible consequences of two largest banks closing down on a Monday morning, with no cash to be withdrawn. Can you at all imagine such situation? Do you believe that the population of UK would have remained civil and peaceful to each other in the face of a large percentage of population having their current accounts locked out? For one, i do not. I believe the army would have been on the streets, and UK would have entered a period of civil unrest with unimaginable consequences.

Neo-liberal free-markets were never free. Any meticulous student of neo-liberalism not entirely taken by its ideology would have discovered this. In the year 2008 the whole world had a gigantic proof that free-markets were entirely dependent on the acts of states to develop, nurture and bail them out when necessary. Unregulated, left to their own freedoms, markets – lead by the financial one where innovation in products and trading schemes originated – developed into an enormous danger to the entire society. Rightly, citizens’ trust in them worldwide has collapsed (Globescan 2009).

It is through emphasis on practice, entirely based on the methodology appropriated from Free Software and other communities of hackers, that Raymond states his claim. Here is how he described Richard Stallman’s work:

In 1985, RMS published the GNU Manifesto. In it he consciously created an ideology out of the values of the pre-1980 ARPANET hackers — complete with a novel ethico-political claim, a self-contained and characteristic discourse, and an activist plan for change. RMS aimed to knit the diffuse post-1980 community of hackers into a coherent social machine for achieving a single revolutionary purpose. His behavior and rhetoric half-consciously echoed Karl Marx’s attempts to mobilize the industrial proletariat against the alienation of their work.(Raymond 2004, 69)

In short, Stallman created a ideology. While Raymond and his group did not:

“Open source” was explicitly intended to replace Stallman’s preferred “free software” with a public label that was ideologically neutral, acceptable both to historically opposed groups like the BSD hackers and those who did not wish to take a position in the GPL/anti-GPL debate.(Raymond 2004, 74)

What we have according to Raymond is ideology (FS) versus ideology neutral (OS). However, when he states, “for me, the working method is the ideology” (Moody 2008), he exposes one side of the broken logic of his claim bare. If, as Raymond claims, methodology is central to Open Source, and methodology is ideology, Open Source is not ideology neutral. Its ideology is, as he says, methodology. Hence, by his own logic, Free Software and Open Source would be just two ideological concepts and communities. Free Software would be an ethico-political ideology, while Open Source would be ideology based purely on methodology of work.

However, as i demonstrated above, the claim of being methods based is false. Methods were developed and made widely popular and successful largely by the Free Software movement, Open Source appropriated it. Hence, not only is Raymond’s key claim about ideology (FS) versus ideology neutral (OS) untrue, its starting points are false too. In other words, he did not even have a coherent starting point. The only thing that is unique to the Open Source group is their approach to capitalism, their embrace of free-market ideology.

It is thus not a surprise, but rather another confirmation of capitalist ideology as the only valid point in Open Source, that interviewees did not care about either Free Software (freedom, community, sharing) or Open Source (methods) ideas, and instead based their decision mostly on the low-cost aspect and freedom from vendor lock-in (Campbell-Kelly and Garcia-Swartz 2009). Authors’ mistaken view, which destroys the possibility of a more useful analytical development of their research, is to contrast ideology with pragamatism. This is typical of liberal notion of ideology, one found in liberal political science textbooks, in which capitalism is naturalized, and in which acting according to the rules of a capitalist firm, or a government agency, is not seen as ideological. Socialist firms and government agencies in Yugoslavia, and most importantly the overall relation between the producer and consumer, had a lot in common with capitalist firm and forms of government, which perhaps explains a rapid conversion to the consumption model of the free market:

But what constituted the failure on behalf of the socialist project was that it rehearsed the divorce between the productivity and consumption in the subjectivity (differentiation between worker and consumer otherwise also known as alienation of producer from his products) and the mediation between them via the process of abstraction and mediation by means of the general equivalent the same way the capitalist project did. In this regard it remained tributary of the capital relation and consequently was essentially deserving of the name it got – state-capitalism. (Medak 2004)

The point Medak make is a crucial one: Free Software offers an intervention into the main nodes of the capitalist production (alienation of labour and circulation of commodities via abstraction of money – all of this free of ideology, according to liberal theorists), perhaps better than socialist state projects from the last century did. Which does not diminish their importance, it merely points out one of possible key causes for their failure, and possible path of development of new egalitarian political projects.

Aside with this brief excursion, Raymond is incapable of holding his own constructs logically coherent. The above is one example, there are plenty of others scattered across his texts. Another example is that he saw BSD communities as a pragmatist opposition that rejected GNU’s ideological primacy (Raymond 2004, 71). However, they became included in his Open Source concept, through inclusion of method of work, as a part of the Open Source success story, as an essential argument for construction of the Open Source movement. Again, if ideology is method, and GNU was ideological, as Raymond claims, GNU’s methods were more successful as ideology. Hence, it made no logical sense to include BSD communities under a newly formed Open Source concept as an example of the success of the pragmatist model. It was the GPL, copyleft and the FS movement model that were a success, and not BSD, as Raymond himself wrote on occasions. It gets very confusing and it is difficult to follow.

For Raymond, with his creation of Open Source, communities that objected to FS and GPL, like BSD, which were not successful in comparison with FS and GPL successes, suddenly became important because they fitted his pragmatist category.

Regarding the main pragmatist success story, Linux, Linus Torvalds might have been, and still is, a person who does not agree with Richard Stallman’s firm stance on Free Software principles, but he nevertheless choose them, and still sticks by them, through his use of GPL license. Perhaps pragmatically so, but it demonstrates the efficiency of the Free Software cooperative, ethical and licensing models, and the degree of success of its ideology. As early as 1995, Torvalds openly expressed that he uses and likes proprietary software that gets the job done better (Williams 2002, 157). Regardless of this admission, and his open dislike of Stallman’s hard stance, Torvalds clearly understands that he would not have been able to even start his Linux project, if there was no GNU project tools and libraries, ethics, licensing and Stallman’s unfettered belief in all of it.

Finally, it was people from these pragmatist BSD-license communities, many of them coming from Berkeley, that sometimes “shared by selling the software back to these students and the taxpayers who had paid for their work”. Sun was one of the companies that profited from such privatization of socially funded development (Wayner 2000, 96, 132). So did Microsoft, although quietly and without any commitment to such model (Adamba 2001). This is another feature in line with the neo-liberal ideology of socializing the cost of developing (arms and pharmaceutical industries), while privatizing profits [REF].

Splitting the community: top-down, corporate exclusion of Free Software hackers and their ideals

The key event for the birth of the Open Source was the release of Netscape browser source code. It was a desperate last attempt by a company whose market share was being crushed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Michael Tiemann explained how Netscape move inspired foundation of the Open Source Initiative: “we decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with ‘free software’ in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.” (Tiemann 2008) In his first announcement to the community, after consultations with a number of interested companies and individuals, Raymond issued the call to arms “Goodbye, ‘free software’; hello, ‘open source’”, in which he stated two problems with Free Software. First, it is confusing and ambiguous, since it is unclear whether free means no money charged, or free to be modified by anyone. Second:

it makes a lot of corporate types nervous [...] we now have a pragmatic interest in converting these people  [...] a chance we can make serious gains in the mainstream business world without compromising our ideals and commitment to technical excellence — so it’s time to reposition. We need a new and better label. We suggest that everywhere we as a culture have previously talked about “free software”, the label should be changed to “open source”. Open-source software. The open-source model. The open source culture. (Raymond 1998)

Here we have a series of implicit statements, present from the logic of the text. The key operation Open Source founders executed was getting rid of Free Software ethical principles. If such operation is done “without compromising our” ideals, that implies that Free Software hackers cannot be included in “our”. In other words, Open Source initiative was exclusion of all Free Software hackers who held Free Software ethical ideals. This was never publicly stated, of course, it would have caused an outrage if Raymond came out with such statement. Effectively, he did say it. He just expressed it in a subtle way that required a bit of analysis to render it visible.

Exclusion of all Free Software hackers and their ideals was not just symbolized, but also practically done through the exclusion of Richard Stallman from Open Source founding events (Williams 2002, 165). Tim O’Reilly recalls that at the meeting where a new name was decided on, they voted, and decided to all stick with the Open Source, which got 9 out of 15 votes. This was for O’Reilly “a solidarity message” (Williams 2002, 164). How bizarre! This was solidarity. What about Stallman and large Free Software communities that Stallman’s views were representative of? It certainly was not in any sort of solidarity with them. They were excluded from the start, together with the central ideas on which the communities were built on. Equally important, such strategy was in total opposition with the most fundamental of all Inter Engineering Task Force (IETF) cardinal principles: open process, according to which “any interested person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the issue” (IETF, Request for Comments 3935, 2004).

In short, Open Source was a betrayal of volunteer driven open collaboration of software and networking communities in several ways. Apart from betraying the ethics of Free Software and excluding entire large communities of hackers, and apart from betraying the IETF principle of open process, being strictly motivated by the financial rewards derived from the vast investments in the field was another betrayal. Eric Raymond dismissed financial motivation (Raymond 1999). His dismissal is absurd. Not only did he rose from a fringe software hacker to the status of a rich (a millionaire many times over) celebrity, but Open Source was an explicit, clearly stated call for capitalist investors to put their money into this narrow subset of the Internet Model.

Raymond and many others were rewarded by Open Source business co-conspirators with share allocations, once some of the first Open Source companies floated on the stock market and became worth tens, some hundreds, of millions of dollars over night (Moody 2001, 235-6). This stands in stark contrast with the detail from the spring 2000, when Eben Moglen paid a lunch for himself and Stallman, knowing that he was the only one who had some money to pay for it (Williams 2002, 184).

We can speculate what was the extent of the impact of Open Source pleasing investors on the overall phenomena known as the dot-com bubble. However, we can broadly say that Raymond and Open Source founders played an active part in inflated expectations leading to one of the largest financial crashes since the 1930’s crisis, superseded only by the recent financial crisis.

Following statements, from different books and times, show how subtle, clever and thoroughly ideological, Open Source move was:

My impression at the time was that he (Linus Torvalds) had those conclusions as latent knowledge, but that I was causing the knowledge to be-come explicit in his mind. So I think that when he read my draft, he essentially consciously discovered what he already knew. (Moody 2001, 152) [...] The one thing Torvalds did not offer was a new ideology, a new rationale or positive generative myth of hacking (Raymond 2004, 49) [...]  You can view it as a continuation of a theme that’s been present in my work all along, which is the conscious elucidation of unconscious knowledge (Moody 2001, 153).

Here we have Raymond uncovered as a mature, clever, respectable ideolog, explicitly defining himself as one who creates ideology for the new movement, in contrast to his early claims that FS is ideological, while OS is neutral, pragmatic. The most efficient ideological moves, or perhaps we can say the only properly ideologically ones, are those that are not false, whose content is truthful. What makes them ideological is what they leave out, what they do not tell us, in order to both hide some existing domination (power-over) and exploitation, and to justify such relation as valid, logical, and acceptable (Žižek 1994, 7-9). This is a simpler form of ideological operation.

What we get from Raymond in the above quote is a more complex move. Not only does he cut out Free Software ethics and hackers and some other key Internet Model collaborative principles, he insists that what he does is only an act of elucidation of what was already an existing unconscious knowledge. He thus puts the responsibility and justification for his ideological move (his creation of a new community, exclusions, betrayals and strictly financial motivations) not on the acts of Open Source founders and his leadership, but he instead projects it onto the internal, personal, psychology of those who accept the new concept and accept being followers of this new community.

The precision by which he expresses this move is striking. As we know from Žižek’s portrayal of Donal Rumsfeld as a philosopher, in the matrix of four possible states of the known/unknown, it is the unknown-known, a combination that Rumsfeld did not mention, that matters most (Žižek 2004, 95). This is the definition of the unconscious: stuff that we do know, but we are not aware that we know it. Raymond stuffed his entire creation into the unconscious, pulling it out of it like a magician pulling the rabbit out of the black hat. Most likely, unaware, or shall we say unconscious?, of the trick he pulled. Here we are, happy to oblige. The trick, after all, was not that great. Raymond misrepresentation of history continues:

“Before The Cathedral and the Bazaar, open-source development was a folk practice, a set of working methods evolved unconsciously by hackers who had no theory about why the things they were doing actually worked. It didn’t have a name—and no, “free software” wasn’t it, because that label was about ideology and goals rather than working methods and communications structures.” (Moody 2008)

As we have seen from Raymond’s claims analysed earlier in the text, these are entirely false claims. His work was all about a new ideology and new goals, as much as work of Free Software communities prior to his Open Source project was about working methods and communication structures. Ideological framing is unsurprisingly present in the official document, History of OSI:

“The prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture. OSI was formed as an educational, advocacy, and stewardship organization at a cusp moment in the history of the culture.” (Tiemann 2008)

Suddenly, once the move of the exclusion through the splitting of the community is forgotten, excluded are back, as a supporting argument to the claim that the Open Source Initiative, the main organisation behind the Open Source, includes the entire history of software and networking engineering and hacking communities.

Discussions on a Debian GNU/Linux email lists at the time reveal more about the way Open Source came into life and the schism it caused. Dissatisfaction with the way Raymond was leading the OSI project was so high, that a formal proposal was made for Software For Public Interest (SPI), a Debian umbrella organization, to take over the OSI (Carter 1999). Most of criticism focused on secrecy, lack of community involvement and opaque communication and decision making, all features contrary to the way hackers, and especially project like Debian, operate (Towns 1999; Perens 1999; Schuessler 1999). A discussion continued clarifying the role of OSI to sit between suits (corporate capital) and hackers, asking for “some formal procedures”.

The strongest condemnation of the OSI way of working came in clear terms: “The ‘Open Software Initiative’ is a CLOSED organization. That’s damn near to hypocrisy” (Brinkmann 1999). In the same fascinating thread, the difference between the hackers and business way was boldly stated:

> Admitting your mistakes, your bugs, your design flaws,
> whatever is a key element of free software development.

You are absolutely right. That is how hackers do things. It’s
completely lacking in a business environment. If we were to be seen
as hackers, we would get the same regard that hackers have always
gotten: zero.

An angry response followed, stating that Brinkmann does not understand the job they, OSI, have to do, which is to negotiate licences in secrecy, because that, doing it closed, is the nature of how it is done: there is no time for open participation of the community (Nelson 1999a). Because of Nelson’s unfriendly response, another member suggests that this type of response is the reason why SPI should get the control over the Open Source (Winebarger 1999a).

Nelson defends, since OSI has been doing all of the work on Open Source, it hence owns it: “In my universe, those who do the work get to own it” (Nelson 1999b). Same Nelson who just insisted that hacker principles of community, cooperation, dialogue, openness, cannot be withheld, since that is not how you can operate in the business environment (with suits). You have to adjust to their language, not listen to, nor cooperate closely with your hacker community any more, but adopt negotiations in secrecy instead. Yet, when he was challenged about the ownership of the work, Nelson went back to his hacker beliefs and chose to own the work because he was doing it.

However, why would the ownership of the work done with “suits” be allocated according to hacker rules, and why not according to the rules of “suits”, following Nelson’s own way of accepting the business rules over the rules of his community on whose behalf he was acting? According to business rules, the work belongs to those who pay for it, or who have more resources to command the situation, to assert their rule. Nelson’s inconsistency was in line with Raymond’s texts and claims: they both used or discarded hacker ethics selectively, as it suited them. Which is a remarkably fast adoption to how corporations think and act: nothing is sacred, and everything is allowed as long as you are not caught, all in the name of profit. Even when a corporation, or large parts of an entire sector, are caught, as the 2008 financial crisis shows, if your corporation is large and important enough, the state will jump in and cover for your losses.
This discussion on Debian mailing lists showed the extent to which the corporate capitalist ethic was in clash with the hacker ethic, and Raymond’s and Nelson’s troubles to operate between the two ethical systems demonstrate their incompatibility. Nelson got another striking response stating the incompatibility between suits and hackers:

“It may be that the “suits” can identify with a highly closed operation, but the free software community is much more democratic, and its members (I’ve found) tend to be more freedom-concious than average. Backroom dealings might be acceptable as necessary, but without accountability, that acceptance is likely to be low to none” (Winebarger 1999b).

This crisis between OSI and Debian arose around the Apple licence claims to be an Open Source one. It brought to the surface differences between OSI licence processes too. Another user reminded that the Nestscape Public Licence (NPL) went through precisely the process Nelson claims is impossible: it was done through a newsgroup that anyone can join, and amongst many discussions, Richard Stalman, Bruce Perens and Netscape employees discussed issues concerning the licence. Several NPL/MPL drafts were circulated in the process, and while the starting licence was not Free Software, final draft was. Although there were many private conversations between Perens, Raymond and Netscape, there was “also an *open* public process”, and the community of Free Software, have the right to insist on such mandatory open process (Pennington 1999). The day later, Nelson announces that OSI board made a decision to decide on all licences through an open, public, mailing list (Nelson 1999c). Community pressure did have some effect on this occasion.

Not surprisingly, Richard Stallman saw the Apple License in a completely different light than Open Source founders did:

Overall, I think that Apple’s action is an example of the effects of the year-old “open source” movement: of its plan to appeal to business with the purely materialistic goal of faster development, while putting aside the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation, and what kind of society we want to live in.

Apple has grasped perfectly the concept with which “open source” is promoted, which is “show users the source and they will help you fix bugs”. What Apple has not grasped–or has dismissed–is the spirit of free software, which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software. (Stallman 1999)

In a response to it, Craig Sander wrote:

i think it is worth pointing out here that the rapid bug-fixing and development of features is merely a side-effect of this spirit of free software. i.e. it is *because* we know that the software is free and can never be taken away from us, and *because* we know we are contributing to the common good that we are willing to volunteer our time and energy and skills to improving free software.

without that security of knowledge, why should we bother? we would be better off putting our time and energy into something which was truly free than putting it into something which may be taken away from us in the future.
free software is, IMO, an example of enlightened self-interest – we are helping others by helping ourselves, and making an investment in software “infrastructure” which will benefit us all for decades (or more) to come. (Sanders 1999)

What Sanders refers to, talking about the software infrastructure which will benefit us for decades, is, a form of commons, a form of wealth and resource available to all, yet belonging exclusively to no one. The enlightened self-interest – which liberals might equate with the notions of individual rights and legal system to protect those, primarily the right to property – is here translated into the common of software. The right to property takes away the collective product created within organizations and asserts the ownership of it by the organization and individuals who own it, thus removing the ability of workers to have any say in it; they have nothing beyond the wage they receive for the labour they sell. This right of owners of capital and of means of production to claim ownership and hence further destiny over what is collectively (every company) produced is closely guarded by the state and laws. Free Software, and the spirit shown in the reaction to the creation of the capitalist Open Source movement is the spirit of non-alienated workers who feel and understand the value of non-alienated, commonly utilized and managed production. The production of the commons. Free Software movement refuses to put aside ‘the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation’, and most important, the question of ‘what kind of society we want to live in’. Richard Stallman’s words that proponents of Open Source do not grasp the spirit of Free Software, ‘which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software’, are succinctly stated basis on which we can read Free Software and its hacker communities as a a form of communist spirit, one which becomes more visible in the clask with the capitalist counter-revolutionary acts of Open Source ideologues. Not communist as in the communist state projects or communist political parties of the twentieth century – these were only the forms that the idea of communism took in the past century – but communist in the spirit of the core ideas of communism. It is not for no reason that community is a root word for the ideas assigned to the concept of communism. The desires expressed by Stallman, of workers to take control over the product of their work, and most importantly, of the type of communities they form to cooperate in order to create a form of commons (and not to earn individually split profit), are deeply communist ideas.

The history of industry and commerce (in software and knowledge production) is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces (hackers, Open Access and Open Process in academia) against modern conditions of production (Fordism in software, Java, factory production-line type of division of labour, precariousness in education), against the property relations (copyright, patenting software) that are the conditions for the existence of the (software) bourgeois and of its rule. The productive forces at the disposal of society (the cooperation of the multitude, in Hardt/Negri terms, or simply volunteer cooperation of communities of knowledge and affect workers) no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters (as soon as the multitude becomes political, although hackers and education workers are already engaged in the struggle within the production), they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property (the new commons: shared software, knowledge, arts, even shared recipes for medical drugs). The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground (communication and knowledge industries) are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself (Marx and Engels 2005, 225-6).

The above paragraph is entirely a quote from the Communist Manifesto, with my comments that bring it to our moment in time placed in brackets.

Free Software and hackers, and their originating environment, education institutions, are the productive forces most intensely involved in the production of new commons. Their impulse to share globally, to be leaders in the decommodification of the knowledge and important type of means of production (software), to be at the forefront of the creation of new commons, is a communist, at minimal commonist, impulse. What could make it communist, is the creation of new political subjectivity, based on rethinking of the idea of communism and the organizational capabilities of the multitude (which for  me slightly, but significantly, differs from the concept developed by Hardy/Negri; to be developed elsewhere)  today, one that would be capable of expressing and developing new commons as a political project. It is here that we’re faced with some of the limits of Marx’s analysis for our contemporary moment:

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

This does not resonate with the situation today. Despite numerous efforts to squeeze our situation today into Marx’s framework, we do not have anything closely resembling the working class, or the proletarians. That excludes small left parties, who still try to forcefully bend reality and shove it into Marx’s concepts, rather than write useful theory to extend and patch up where Marx theoretically failed, or where he stopped. Instead, the closest we have is the theoretical framework of the Multitude. Yet, Hardt/Negri concept is still in its pre-political, or early political, phase. Although their Commonwealth book patches up some if it (more on this in the next part), it still lacks enough of common language to speak about both the subjects and the objects of a new communism, or new communisms. Most important, it lacks the organizational framework to take us beyond the retarded party system which both Hardt/Negri and Badiou (2008) reject.

We need a new, hacked communism. A philosophy and a science for the new commons, and a new globally egalitarian political language and practices. Open Process is an attempt to think this problem aloud. As comrade Žižek said wisely in his interview for the BBC2 TV The Culture Show recently, the future will be red. Either from the flames of hell, or the flags of communism. “SEE YOU IN HELL, or IN COMMUNISM!”? Either way, the future is bright. Bright red.

References:

Adamba. 2001. “Microsoft, TCP/IP, Open Source, and Licensing.” kuro5hin.org. Available at: http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357 [Accessed November 13, 2009].

Badiou, Alain. 2008. The meaning of Sarkozy. London: Verso.

Brinkmann, Marcus. 1999. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00063.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz. 2009. “Pragmatism, not ideology: Historical perspectives on IBM’s adoption of open-source software.” Information Economics and Policy 21(3): 229-244.

Carter, Joseph. 1999. “[PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/03/msg00106.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Castells, Manuel. 2001. “The Hacker Ethic and The Spirit of the Information Age: Epilogue.” In Secker & Warburg, p. 156-188.

Category:Open – P2P Foundation. Available at: http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open [Accessed August 5, 2009].

Coffin, Jill. 2006. “An analysis of open source principles in diverse collaborative communities.” First Monday 11(6). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1342/1262 [Accessed February 18, 2010].

Dedrick, Jason, and Joel West. 2008. “Movement Ideology vs. User Pragamtism in the Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software.” In Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion, Information Today, Inc., p. 427-452.

DiBona, Chris, Mark Stone, and Danese Cooper. 2005. Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Fleming, Peter. 2009. Authenticity and the cultural politics of work : new forms of informal control. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Geer, Richard Malter, and Toni Prug. 2005. “Introduction to Open Organizations.” Available at: http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/IntroToOpenOrg [Accessed September 20, 2009].

Globescan. 2009. Free market flawed, says survey. BBC World Service. Available at: http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbc2009_berlin_wall/bbc09_berlin_wall_release.pdf [Accessed November 9, 2009].

Graham, Paul. 2004. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Greant, Zak, and Michael Widenius. 2009. “The hacking business model.” Available at: http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/The_hacking_business_model [Accessed October 30, 2009].

H. Alverstrand. 2004. “RFC 3935 -  A Mission Statement for the IETF.” Available at: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3935.txt [Accessed August 6, 2009].

Himanen, Pekka. 2001. The Hacker Ethic and The Spirit of the Information Age. Secker & Warburg.

Krishnamurthy, Sandeep. 2002. “Cave or Community?: An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source Projects.” First Monday 7(6). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/960/881 [Accessed November 18, 2009].

Lakhani, Karim R, and Robert G Wolf. 2003. “Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects.” SSRN eLibrary.

Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Anchor.

Marx, Karl. 1990. 1 Capital. Penguin. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 2005. The Communist Manifesto. Longman.

Medak, Tomislav. 2004. “A Continuum of Knowledge – A contribution to the Political Economy of Copyleft.” Available at: http://www.makeworlds.org/node/96 [Accessed October 30, 2009].

Moody, Glyn. 2009. “Do Top Hackers Have Too Much Money?.” Linux Journal. Available at: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/do-top-hackers-have-too-much-money [Accessed October 30, 2009].

Moody, Glyn. 2008. “Interview with Eric S. Raymond.” Available at: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9911 [Accessed August 4, 2009].

Moody, Glyn. 2001. Rebel Code: Linux and The Open Source Revolution. The Penguin Press.

Murtola, A-M. “On the Incorporation of Critique of Capitalism.” ephemera: theory & politics in organization.

Nelson, Russell. 1999a. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00064.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Nelson, Russell. 1999b. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00067.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Nelson, Russell. 1999c. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00083.html [Accessed November 11, 2009].

Obama, Barack. 2009. “Transparency and Open Government.” Federal Register 74(97): 23901-23902.

Pennington, Havoc. 1999. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00060.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Perens, Bruce. 1999. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00013.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Prug, Toni. 2009. “Open Process Academic Publishing.” Available at: http://hackthestate.org/open-process-academic-publishing/ [Accessed November 4, 2009].

Raymond, Eric. 1999. “Surprised By Wealth.” Linux Today. Available at: http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-12-10-001-05-NW-LF [Accessed October 30, 2009].

Raymond, Eric. 2004. The art of Unix programming. Boston: Addison-Wesley.

Raymond, Eric S. 1998. “Goodbye, “free software”; hello, “open source”.” Available at: http://catb.org/~esr/open-source.html [Accessed October 21, 2009].

Raymond, Eric S. 2001. The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Revised & Expanded ed. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Sanders, Craig. 1999. “Re: Apple and Open Source.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/03/msg00065.html [Accessed November 11, 2009].

Schuessler, Eric. 1999. “Re: Apple claims “Open Source” trademark.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/03/msg00055.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Sowe, Sulayman K., and Ioannis G. Stamelos. 2007. Emerging free and open source software practices. Idea Group Inc (IGI).

Stallman, Richard. 2002a. Free Software, Free Society: Selected essay of Richard M. Stallman. Free Software Foundation.

Stallman, Richard. 2002b. “On Hacking.” Available at: http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html [Accessed October 21, 2009].

Stallman, Richard. 1999. “Re: Apple and Open Source.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/03/msg00063.html [Accessed November 11, 2009].

Thomas, Douglas. 2003. Hacker Culture. University of Minnesota Press.

Tiemann, Michael. 2008. “History of the OSI | Open Source Initiative.” Available at: http://www.opensource.org/history [Accessed November 10, 2009].

TOOOL. 2010. “The Open Organization of Lockpickers :: Educational Endeavors.” Available at: http://toool.us/education.html [Accessed February 18, 2010].

Towns, Anthony. 1999. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00055.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Wayner, Peter. 2000. Free for all : how Linux and the free software movement undercut the high-tech titans. 1st ed. New York: Harper Business.

Wilcox, Joe. 2000. “IBM to spend $1 billion on Linux in 2001 – CNET News.” CNET News. Available at: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-249750.html [Accessed October 21, 2009].

Williams, Sam. 2002. Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Winebarger, Lynn. 1999a. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00065.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Winebarger, Lynn. 1999b. “Re: [PROPOSAL] Open Source certification.” Available at: http://lists.debian.org/spi-general/1999/04/msg00069.html [Accessed November 10, 2009].

Žižek, Slavoj. 1994. Mapping Ideology. Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without bodies : Deleuze and consequences. New York: Routledge.

Tim O’Reilly was, along with Raymond, perhaps the key figure in the business part of the group of Open Source (let’s not forget that almost all of the Open Source founders were part of the FS communities to an extent) counter-revolution. Behlendorf, one of the Apache project founders, was inspired [...]]]>

Engineering the privatization of the common

Tim O’Reilly was, along with Raymond, perhaps the key figure in the business part of the group of Open Source (let’s not forget that almost all of the Open Source founders were part of the FS communities to an extent) counter-revolution. Behlendorf, one of the Apache project founders, was inspired how the Internet developed through the IETF principles: rough consensus and running code, specialist working groups open to all, and Requests For Comments (RFC) documents (Moody 2001, 128). In 1999, Tim O’Reilly invited Behlendorf to develop his new ideas on open source business models. The results was a joined company which in June 2000 closed $35 million round of funding, including Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle and Sun amongst the investors (Moody 2001, 249). Early signs of a capitalist counter-revolution were encouraging.

O’Reilly’s main concerns were the new sources of profit, commoditization of software, network-enabled collaboration and software as a service (DiBona, Stone, and Cooper 2005, 255). He found inspiration in companies like Google and Amazon, praising them for their vastly profit making strategy, calling them Free Software based, yet “fiercely proprietary”:

even when using and modifying software distributed under the most restrictive of free software licenses, the GPL, these sites are not constrained by any of its provisions, all of which are conditioned on the old paradigm. The GPL’s protections are triggered by the act of software distribution, yet web-based application vendors never distribute any software: it is simply performed on the Internet’s global stage, delivered as a service rather than as a packaged software application (DiBona, Stone, and Cooper 2005, 258).

In short, Google and Amazon managed to bypass Stallman’s GPL legal hack and harness the contribution of the software and networking, without contributing back. O’Reilly is inspired by the corporations who take from the Free Software communities, without giving back. He is inspired by the new form of privatization of commons. Put more bluntly in the text that O’Reilly claimed inspired him, the central idea is to let communities produce, and let us package and sell the product and collect the profit from it:

There is huge value to be captured from commodity networks, but it is not to be found in the production of the underlying software resources. Instead, this value can be found in the distribution of platform-standardized information, and also in the form of political power (Stutz 2004).

It is only logical then that projects like Collabnet – which help corporations build and develop collaborative closed networks amongst clusters of companies – close down further communal, open process sharing aspects of software and networking communities.

In the first step, Open Source removed the ethical aspect and allowed the use of volunteer cooperative work for private profit without the mandate to contribute back, along with the Amazon/Google model. An essential step in the open process chain, return of contributions back into the open environment, was made optional. The logic of private profit, the key reason behind this removal, was imposed. The potential for the flow of cooperation was broken. A potential for closure, secrecy and extraction of private profit from the enclosed common was institutionalized.

What BSD type licences allowed, and what was happening with the relationship between corporations and universities from the beginning, was institutionalized by the OSI. BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, and the work of people at the Department of Computer Science was extension of the AT&T UNIX shared by the corporation with the university. Eventually, AT&T took BSD to court, which prompted the project to replace all the AT&T code with a newly written code. A corporate free BSD was born (Wayner 2000, 36-39). Sun, standing for Stanford University Network, was another company emerging from a university, and having used a lot of BSD code, it had a very close relationship with Berkeley too. Yet, as it is widely known from their Java language licence, Sun stubbornly refused to take part in Free Software, sticking with Open Source (Wayner 2000, 176-8). Which does make sense from their point of view: it was the liberal approach of BSD licence, and utilization of university funded research that made their company possible.

The relationship between the state funding, universities and corporations at the forefront of new computing technologies have been a close and long standing: “Federal support has constituted roughly 70 percent of total university research funding in computer science and electrical engineering since 1976” (National Research Council USA 1999, 2). This has been an important part of the national strategy in USA, especially for building large systems:

Much of the success of major system-building efforts derives from their ability to bring together large groups of researchers from academia and industry who develop a common vocabulary, share ideas, and create a critical mass of people who subsequently extend the technology. ( Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research, National Research Council USA 1999, p8)

This all indicates that GNU project and the Free Software movement were an aberration from the planned cooperative-competitive economy that the state was promoting (Wessner and National Research Council USA 2003, 38-44). An economy in which O’Reilly’s ideas about the enclosure of the common for the private profit fit perfectly. No wonder his publishing company has thrived.

Projects like Collabnet represent a second step away from the Free Software and open process methods: capitalist friendly aspects of cooperation are enclosed inside corporations and corporate networks “utilizing the community-based model, without losing intellectual property rights to the public” (Lee and Cole, 647). Although Free Software licensing and open process practices are now widely spread in software and networking communities, exploitation of work that goes into producing Free Software and network protocols is ensured through new ways, without the necessity of privatization of the results of work, of the code: Google and Amazon being examples of this model. This was no coincidence, but a continuation of the state created and heavily funded model. In Open Source, the state got what it wanted, common production of the academic and volunteer model freely utilized for private profit. Open Source frees capitalism from Free Software.

Google search system is good example of a company utilizing the common cleverly. While Red Hat packages software produced in the common and sells it repackaged adding value in the process, Google’s similar model spreads over a far larger base, potentially covering all humans using the Internet. We produce the Web, Google sells it via services that make access to it easier. At the same time, while Google not only pays nothing to index our documents and sell them re-packaged, it charges for users that click on adverts it supplies while they are searching for something. When a Google search engine user clicks on an advert that appears on the page with search results containing number of websites, it collects money from the advertiser. However, what attracted the visitor following the advert was not the Google search engine alone, but the websites listed on the search results page. The commodity form is here combination of the labour of the common (websites on the entire Internet), and value added by Google providing better access to it. But only Google gets monetary reward for it. Their logic is that we are rewarded by Google providing better access to what we collectively produce, the content of the Internet. When a user clicks and goes away, an advert sale has been made and our website did not get a visit, it merely served to attract users and connect them with the advert from which Google profits.

Geopolitics of the common

Google is a tool for better utilization of the commons, engineered for vast private profits, whilst relying on the common production and utilization of what it provides. The larger the common, the more websites that Google can access for free and provide as searchable, the better the sales pitch to advert buyers and Google users, and larger the profits. Google utilizes the labour of the common without privatizing it. Yet, as we have seen with the most funding for technology coming from state funds in USA, Google’s PageRank patent – a concept whose history of has recently been developed (Franceschet 2010) – is held by Stanford university who also got a large number of shares in the company. While the commons are open, the source on which Google built its empire, the algorithm producing their presentation to the users, is closed. Google’s use of the data it stores on its users is also entirely opaque. Their book digitizing is another project where Google used commons to create a vast catalogue of commodities. Again, like in the case of their search system, it uses what the common produces, adds value to it by making the access easier, and repackages it into forms which accommodate profit streams. You cannot copy and paste books that google scans and provides on their website, although they might be copyright free. All of the Google’s processing power is proudly done on cheap hardware running versions of Free Software operating systems, another commons on which Google business model entirely depends.

Google confirms the thesis that ‘capitalist abstraction rests on the common and cannot survive without it, but can only instead constantly try to mystify it’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 159). The example of estate agents is another illustration of it: ‘location, location, location’ is a name for the proximity of the property to the common, to quality of the neighbourhood. It is commons like parks, cultural events, libraries, recreation, education, child care, health, transport facilities, that give value to private property (2009, 156). Google is like estate agents, it places its services in the midst of the best common they can find. In both cases, the larger and better the common, larger their profits can grow, once embedded into the flow of the common being produced and utilized.

What can we do about it? Search systems, as several participants at the Deep Search conference noted, is an essential component of the Web. And given the importance of the Web, and its embeddedness into multiple key aspects of life, the society cannot do without one. The architecture and protocols of the Internet and the Web might be open, developed by IETF via open process, running mostly Free Software, but the architecture of search systems remains closed. This is not good enough. As part of the democratic practice of the common, we have to have search systems built on the basis of IETF and Free Software principles. We need Open Process search systems.

Search systems have four distinct components: Crawler, Index, Search and Rank, and GUI. We could and should build a public infrastructure where first two components are shared, and on top of the indexed Web, open interfaces to various Search and Rank algorithms and user interfaces are provided (Rieder 2008). There are different ways this could be done. One is through existing grid systems used in academia, this system is already distributed, staffed with highly skilled people and like the rest of the Web, mostly built using Free Software. Other option is to internationalize Google. A worldwide public organization could demand from USA to break Google search system away from the rest of the company, release all knowledge to do with how it operates (technical documentation) into the common and make it into a separate globally owned company. Democratic ownership would also ensure accountability in dealing with user data, something Google arrogantly refuses to do. The form of such global ownership, the model of the new management of the commons, remains an issue to solve. Google uses Free Software to utilize the commons (Web) as their core profit stream. Yet neither belong to any single nation.

Hence, the solution on how to manage it should not belong to any single nation’s economic and legal system – regardless of where the Google corporation, or any other entity utilizing the commons for the profit, is legally based. Indeed, in the discussion on the patenting of biological material, the question of disclosing the origin of the material part of a patent application is one of the key political issues (Howard 2008). When a seed of a Brazilian, or an Indian origin is to be patented, mandating disclosing the origin in the application can be used to deny bio-piracy by the more developed economies of the biological material originating in less developed countries. In a similar way, who gives the Google right to utilize what is common to the world, the Web, for private profit and without global accountability?

Why would we allow Google to be subject to the laws of any single state? The French state attempt to control what Google does within their web-territory renders the tension between the commons, for profit organizations and the state visible.
The question is then, why do not other organizations, in other states, do what Google does, and why not use them instead? They might do so in future better than Google does, and thus become a predominantly used system, but that is beyond the point. They would be under the same logic presented here, regardless of their location. Furthermore, i can limit my websites exposure to Google by denying their spiders access to it. That still does not address the core issues at stake here. Google would still be utilizing everything that belongs to economic system of which i’m part of, which at minimum, in the narrowest sense, is the national economy to which i pay taxes, in which i live and work, in which i produce and consume. As a member of such entity, as a citizen of a state, i want to assert the ability to dictate conditions under which anyone, including Google, utilizes anything produced by any members of the state i live in.

In other words, a state ought to control its economic affairs. Yet, with the Web, such affairs, economic activity, cannot be fully geographically located. Although i work in London/UK, the product of my work may appear is text based, and as such can be hosted by any of the servers i choose for hosting, in large number of states worldwide. Who should have a say in the economic benefits derived from what i produce? The state does it by having me immediately pay taxes on what i earn from it. Institutions which might impose and enforce copyright or patent over it might benefit long term from it too. Yet, organizations such as Google benefit economically from it as well. While the state and institutions i work for have a more direct and historical claims over my work, and while these relations are known, regulated and even democratically controlled to a very limited extent, entities like Google derive economic benefits from it without any regulation or democratic control.

Any organization that seeks to utilize the commons and that does it on the large scale should be, under the some form of democratic management of the commons. No entity should be allowed to utilize the commons without a form of such control.
In order to give credit to the remaining Google company and to keep it developing, part of the revenue from the adds would have to go to the company. The difference would be that in this case accountable organization would be setting what kind of adverts to accept, or reject, instead of relying on couple of super rich people and their sense of good and evil. Although, banning adverts for guns is a welcome decision (Lowe 2009, 140).

In short, the issue of utilization of the commons ought not be left to the capitalist corporations. First the states, like the French are trying to do now, and then us, the political multitude in becoming, should intervene. The disruption that Google’s project introduce into the sectors adopting the possibilities of new technologies, mass book scanning for example, are welcome. But not under the rules chosen by the Google’s board.

The Open Process incompatibility with capitalism

Open source, but not necessarily open process.(Asay 2009)

In the ideological cracks, understanding that the open source does not capture the most important feature of the Internet founding communities, open process, appears occasionally.

Open Source enables privatization of the commons of software and wide range of cooperative work, including volunteers, academics and engineers, in both private and public sectors. Collabnet project is further privatization of methods of cooperation. While BSD licences enabled privatization of taxpayers funded university research, Free Software set up axioms (four freedoms) to ensure that contributions to the common stay within it. Academia, its departments and research centres, is the most important location for the open process cooperation partly privatized through BSD style licences and Open Source. However, that is not where interest of corporations and capital end. Perhaps paradoxically, instead of cooperative tools and practices spreading across the rest of academia and society, these tools are being used to assert tighter control of the state and corporations over society and academia (Bousquet 2008). State recommendations and programmes for closer cooperation between the industry and academia are only part of the larger act of changing the core attributes of academic institutions and type of cooperation to the one more suitable to corporations:

Privatization means many things [...] at its most basic [...] it entails converting an institution that is based on a common good, equality, inclusion, self-governance, and ineffability of certain kinds of human development and knowledge. Converting it to one that is bound to entrepreneurship, capital appreciation, and is governed by organizational principles of hierarchy, inequality and immediate commodifiability and applicability of its endeavours. (Save the University: Wendy Brown, Part 6 2009)

The difference between the model of academic institutions and the corporate model is here clearly laid out. The separation between Free Software and Open Source lies on similar lines. University is in the process of being converted to the market model penetrating all aspects of life, Brown continued, in which you keep what you earn, and no democracy can tell you otherwise. In other words, private property is out of the reach of the democratic political order under capitalism. Similarities between Brown’s description of the university lie with Internet founding communities, especially Free Software. Open Source on the other hand, negates some of those core attributes of university, claiming falsely pragmatism over ideology. What they do not say is that such move entails loss of what Richard Stallman and Wendy Brown talk about: loss of one set of features in favour of a different one. Privatization is a procedure of reduction of the circle of decision makers over matters being privatized to those who, through the idea of the constitutional order and the rule of law (Hardt and Negri 2009, 8-16), get assigned ownership over it.

Capitalism and its neoliberal form are not neutral, non-ideological systems. When you apparently have no beliefs other than making a profit, you are not just a pragmatist. You are a capitalist, today most likely a neoliberal one. Open Source position is one hostile to the common, and hostile to the academia and open process ways. Pleasing capitalist investors while betraying the emancipatory potentials, the ideology of Open Source Initiative cannot be anything else but a capitalist one.

Its formation was like the fall of the Berlin wall: instead of the promised unification, we got new, perhaps even harder and more entrenched, divisions. Instead of what Western liberals praised as democratic revolutions in East Europe, in most of the states switching to capitalism we got tyrannies of mafia, church and unregulated capitalist lords, with the destruction of security, education and health provision for most citizens. As the final insult in this, in the case of ex-Yugoslavia utterly failed, capitalist-liberal Alice in Wonderland scenario, the brick wall across a single city of Berlin was replaced with the Schengen barbwire across most of Europe.
Having the same ideological source, Open Source is a similar decoy. It splits, what it claimed will unite. The change that it introduced in licensing and perception of volunteer cooperative software production further strengthens the corporations, whose anti-democratic neoliberal march against the rights of workers and the powers of the common has been consistent and strong since the fall of Berlin wall.

Contrary to it, Open Process can open up the political field, allowing for new forms of directly democratic rethinking of HOW do we, as workers, as institutions, as boroughs, as cities, as states, as networks, or just as groups of associated geographically unrelated humans, cooperate – both as volunteers and as democratically organized wage labourers.

Open Process is, in others words, a democratic potential of our egalitarian commu(o)nist future. Open Source denied us from having it. By its clever twists of history, and corporate collaborations, it temporarily denied us of the possibility of seeing the potential that tools and practices of the Internet and Web founding communities hold. This is an attempt to claim it back.

In order for such future to open up, the questions of economic, political and juridical association for cooperative production for the commons remain the biggest theoretical and practical tasks to be developed. Neither of the forms of capitalist firm, political party, or NGO seem capable of utilizing the Open Process and the Internet Model ways of cooperation.

Most important problem is that both Free Software and IETF cooperations rely on the work being paid in advance, on the time to engage being readily available; as reflected in the roots of hacking being in academia and research centres, within mostly self-managed groups, largely funded by the state. This does not remove the most fundamental relationship, one of capitalist wage labour, from the overall analytical framework that aims to enable reuse of hacking and open processes across society. However, it does suggest that these new forms of cooperation can and do coexist with capitalist wage labour. An easy, but incorrect and partial, way to explain this is to emphasise the importance of Free Software production to capitalism.

Capitalism needed Open Source because Free Software was an uneasy fit (Prug 2007, 79-83). For Stallman, contributions to society deserve reward ‘only in so far as society is free to use the results’. Applying this rule to the economy puts us straight into the logic of left egalitarian though and its political movements, where sharing across the society was one of the most fundamental principles and practices. Left critics often point out that scarcity is actively produced in capitalism. Yet, for Stallman, ‘In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living’. This is what workers movements fought for since the industrial revolution.

Most importantly, the question of surplus value is also expressed clearly in the GNU Manifesto: ‘We have already greatly reduced the amount of work that the whole society must do for its actual productivity, but only a little of this has translated itself into leisure for workers because much non-productive activity is required to accompany productive activity.’ However, Stallman fails to identify capitalism as a reason for the surplus value not being shared across society: ’The main causes of this are bureaucracy and isometric struggles against competition.’ It is striking that regardless of it, the main reason for doing Free Software for Stallman could be lifted out of many left political texts: along with insisting on the right to inspect, modify, share and form communities, he asserts, ‘We must do this, in order for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work for us.’(Stallman 2009)

This central point of GNU Manifesto cannot be situated by a reading of Free Software and Open Source only along the liberal ideas like free speech(Vasile 2009), although free speech undeniably plays a crucial role (Coleman 2009). More important, reduction of the time Stallman mentions, technical gains in productivity to translate into less forced wage labour, cannot be squared with the central liberal tenet of private property, nor its extension into the right to private accumulation and private use of wealth. For Stallman’s claim to become feasible, a necessary rapid increase in social, shared wealth – becoming possible through advances in technology and knowledge – would have to be developed and managed under a new political, economic and legal system of and for the common.

For Antonio Negri, in the search for a good society, emphasis should be on the need to construct together instruments to form the common, without looking for guarantees, but knowing ‘how to construct’. These instruments should be ‘rules of law, economic rules, rules of technology, rules of organization’ (2004, 89). Hackers becoming trained in law and using it to their benefit (Coleman 2009, 448-9) to increase the common, while developing new technologies and organizational forms, fits exactly what Negri is describing. Furthermore, the meaning of work and cooperation, its truth, resides in the common:

there is no truth outside the common — outside what can belong to everyone and what can be verified in language, in cooperation, and in work. A truth is a collective action on the part of persons who campaign together and who transform themselves. I see action as something that constitutes the community, that produces the substance of our dignity and our life. The meaning of action is posited at this level.(Negri 2004, 26)

Is this not a plausible reading of the work of Internet founding communities, especially that of Free Software? In an even more precise formulation, the link between the production and transfer of those practices to the political realm is made: ‘The self-transformation of the multitude in production, grounded in the expansion of the common, gives an initial indication of the direction of the self-rule of the multitude in the political realm.’ (Hardt and Negri 2009, 177)

In other words, IETF and Free Software practices are that models that we ought to try to reuse, adopt in the political sphere. Increased autonomy of labour and its increased technical composition, reduction of the role of bosses who are often just an obstacle to get work done, all point out to the democratic capacities people exercise daily. And although these capacities do not immediately translate into new political democratic organizations, they are a solid basis on which to imagine and construct them (2009, 353). The basis for this move from the production to the political organization is continuous process of making, ‘an uninterrupted process of collective self-transformation’ (2009, 173). Opening and expanding access to the common ‘means seizing control of the means of production and reproduction’. In practice, it means also ‘reappropriating the common’ (2009, 164).

At the centre of this lies biopolitical production, production of scientific knowledge being a good example of it. Broad scientific community has access to shared ideas, methods, results of work. Only through open circulation of these, through journals, conferences, books, website, blogs, is production of science possible. Results must be made common, for a ‘virtuous cycle that leads from the existing common to a new common’ to occur (2009, 145). Today science is moving even further than this. The pace of publication is becoming faster, with some journals publishing immediately upon acceptance [ref], and some even publishing prior to peer reviews [ref]. Some scientist and communities strive to have their data open, while some even keep the entire process open, using the concept of Open Notebook science [ref]. All these are moves towards an open-process production of common. Scientific communities are starting to adopt the hacker culture.

Which brings us to the problem of privatization, enclosure of knowledge and technologies, especially through patents and copyright being the biggest obstacles in the enlargement and development of the production of the common and its open-process form. Google is a prime example of a new form of rent, positioned at the heart of the global common. It utilizes the Web, and our contributions, our common wealth, by provision of services through which it implants itself in the middle of each connection made in the vast pools of common production and communication, selling our activity without seemingly much interference. How much interruption can you claim because of the Google adds?

What Open Source reveals is how do parasitic activity of the new technologies in the hands of corporation and capital develop to appropriate the cooperation, and ‘only a sharpened tool can reveal the movements of the parasite.’ Immaterial rent, patents and copyrights, have ’changed its coordinates of exploitation’, hence ‘a new theory of rent demands a new theory of sabotage before aiming to any new form of organization’ (Pasquinelli 2008, 11). This would make sense, if we knew what was sabotaged in the first place: what are the starting points, what was the form of cooperation, and what is the value of its re-application for egalitarian ideas and movements. But we don’t. Our own concepts and understandings of it have been shaped for the last ten years by strong liberal, capitalist and representational discourses, lead by the Open Source Initiative and the Creative Commons.

The history of our cooperative practices and capacities is constantly being rewritten and appropriated by the capital and its ideologues. Sabotage is temporary, and it accepts the other side as the main actor in the relationship. Open process way and history of hacking shows, it is capital that had to react to our innovative cooperation.

The point of this analysis and our task in general, is not to show how events were, or what ideological constructs accompanied them. Instead, ‘the task is to unearth the hidden potentialities (the utopian emancipatory potentials) which were betrayed‘ (Žižek 2006, 77). Most of works in social sciences are strictly focused on describing and comparatively analysing. Yet, as Brown (2005, 80) puts is succinctly, theory is ‘incommensurate with description’; it does not simply decipher the meanings, but ‘recodes and rearranges them in order to reveal something about the meanings and incoherencies that we live with’. To do so, theory has to be partly speculative, ‘it must disregard the conventional meanings’, as it violates the selfreprsentation of things:

Theory’s most important political offering is this opening of a breathing space between the world of common meanings and the world of alternative ones, a space of potential renewal for thought, desire, and action. (Brown 2005, 81)

The history of the Internet and Web founding communities is, like all other histories, open. This is an attempt to provide another instance of it, one less entangled into the liberal capitalist discourse, and one which ‘expresses its potential in terms of the potential of the whole of the dispossessed classes’ (Wark 2004, 096). What has been stolen from us, we will steal back. The sabotage is theirs. The substance is ours.

The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian togetherness, for a new communism born through the new generation of tools and organizational practices, have temporarily been appropriated and hi-jacked by capitalism under the Open Source and to an extent Creative Commons movements. Through and with the Open Process methods of the founding Internet communities, we can make a significant step towards claiming it back. Commu(o)nism, we could call it, is a new emerging form of communism hacked with open process and new commons. The small (o) in the middle stands for open.

References:

Asay, Matt. 2009. “When open source isn’t (open enough).” CNET News. Available at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10394478-16.html?tag=mncol;posts [Accessed November 11, 2009].

Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How the university works : higher education and the low-wage nation. New York: New York University Press.

Brown, Wendy. 2005. Edgework : critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Coleman, Gabriella. 2009. “CODE IS SPEECH: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers.” Cultural Anthropology 24(3): 420-454.

DiBona, Chris, Mark Stone, and Danese Cooper. 2005. Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Franceschet, Massimo. 2010. “PageRank: Stand on the shoulders of giants.” 1002.2858. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2858 [Accessed February 22, 2010].

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. 1st ed. Harvard University Press.

Howard, Tony. 2008. “The Legal Framework Surrounding
Patents for Living Materials.” In Patenting Lives: Life Patents, Culture and Development (Intellectual Property, Theory and Culture), Ashgate, p. 9-24.

Lee, Gwendolyn K., and Robert Cole. “From a Firm-Based to a Community-Based Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development.” Organization Science, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 633-649, 2003. Available at: http://ssrn.com/paper=950262 [Accessed October 30, 2009].

Lowe, Janet. 2009. Google speaks : secrets of the world’s greatest billionaire entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Hoboken  N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Moody, Glyn. 2001. Rebel Code: Linux and The Open Source Revolution. The Penguin Press.

National Research Council USA. 1999. Funding a revolution : government support for computing research. Washington  D.C.: National Academy Press.

Negri, Antonio. 2004. Negri on Negri. New York: Routledge.

Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2008. Extract from Animal Spirits a Bestiary of the Commons. matteo pasquinelli. Available at: http://www.generation-online.org/c/fc_rent4.pdf.

Prug, Toni. 2007. “Hacking ideologies, part 2: Open Source, a capitalist movement.” In 24c3 Tagungsband Volldampf voraus!, Berlin, Germany: Art d’Ameublement. Available at: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2311.en.html.

Rieder, Bernhard. 2008. “Democratizing Search.” Available at: http://world-information.org/wii/deep_search/en/program [Accessed November 18, 2009].

Save the University: Wendy Brown, Part 6. 2009. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR4xYBGdQgw&feature=youtube_gdata [Accessed November 11, 2009].

Stallman, Richard. 2009. “The GNU Manifesto.” Available at: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html [Accessed November 16, 2009].

Stutz, David. 2004. “The Natural History of Software Platforms.” Available at: http://www.synthesist.net/writing/software_platforms.html [Accessed October 31, 2009].

Vasile, James. 2009. “Hack the System.” Hacker Visions. Available at: http://hackervisions.org/?p=447 [Accessed February 19, 2010].

Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press.

Wayner, Peter. 2000. Free for all : how Linux and the free software movement undercut the high-tech titans. 1st ed. New York: Harper Business.

Wessner, Charles, and National Research Council USA. 2003. Securing the future regional and national programs to support the semiconductor industry. Washington  D.C.: National Academies Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. MIT Press.

[hide] 1 The Internet Model = why Open Access is not enough 2 Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages 3 Internal benefits for journals 4 Modular process: stages and states 5 What if software was developed through closed models? 6 A Simple Transition: the Linux kernel development process 7 Open-process peer reviewing and citing early drafts 8 Final Words 8.1 Notes 8.2 Bibliography 8.3 Acknowledgements

Abstract

Publishing and knowledge [...]]]>

Abstract

Publishing and knowledge production in academia can be significantly improved if aspects of cooperative models developed in software and networking communities are adopted. Open Access movement does that partially, by focusing on the openness of the final result. The most important attributes of the development of the Internet, the Web and their communication-cooperation tools is openness of the entire process of production. The novelty that can take many forms is in the organizational structures, decision making and cooperation. This article argues that journals adopting a form of open-process approach could benefit by increased quality of submissions and publications, faster and more responsive pace of research and by attracting more risk taking and innovative authors. Through clearer structure and visibility of tasks, equally important could be possible internal benefits for journals: recognition of the most important workers and decision making in their hands, easier and improved project management, attracting new volunteers and reducing the impact of counter-productive participants. If these changes were implemented well, such open-process journals would gain readership and reputation. Open-process academic publishing can take procedurally and technologically complex forms. A simple transition model is suggested: how to start with an email list and right cultural safeguards.

The Internet Model = why Open Access is not enough

Publishing and peer review processes in academia are outdated and closed models. Key flaws are lack of transparency in pre-publication process, lack of dialogue in both pre and post-publication phases, and linear use of digital media that only scratches the surface of possibilities for greater reflexivity and dialogue in order to have more powerful, effective and responsive knowledge production (Cope and Kalantzis 2009). The history of peer review is closely tied to state and royal censorship, and academics take turn in disciplining each other and providing sense of order and assurance that a good science is produced, so that the contract between the state and science is preserved (Biagioli 2002:12-13).

At least in the areas i operate in (social sciences and humanities), these processes should be far more, if not entirely, open, with a provision for privacy in special cases. I call this model Open-process academic publishing. The name deliberately distinguishes it from Open Access (Suber 2007), which refers to only the outcome of academic knowledge production being open. The suggestion is not to open the processes in random ways, but in ways in which this openness – fundamentally based on volunteer participation – brings and enables more structure, more internalized working discipline, more commitment, and more ability to improve cooperation with deliberate precision, all with the goal of improving the outcomes. Since ’culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has’ (Crocker 2009), we could call it The Internet Model (software + networking). Its potential screams for being reused, hacked, for other areas of production. Academia, especially its publishing side, seems to me capable of embracing such volunteer-core open-process cooperation.

The model proposed here brings only few new aspects, mainly those related to the work done in the Open Organizations project (Geer, Malter, and Prug 2005a). It is an abstraction, a theoretical development of decades of developments in software and networking, and in related concepts and practices, especially in their open-process part, that has already been partly reused in news production (Arnison 2003).

What are my motives, you might ask? I am a PhD student dreading the idea of being drawn into the existing closed model. In social sciences and humanities (dozens of journals that i checked), author mostly have very little idea how long will it take your submission to be processed, what are the stages in the process and how do you engage with it, other than wait for the unknown length of time. Quite a few journals do have some of these elements stated on their web pages, but it still takes several months and often years, and it does not embrace open processes for better cooperation. Given what is possible and what we can observe in the production of software and networking, the current practice makes very little sense to me. Geared against innovation, seemingly ‘most appropriate for papers that contain little that is new’, on average with less capable researchers often judging the work by the best ones (Armstrong 1997:6) – i find the current state of academic publishing depressing and unacceptable. The most unacceptable element is that we are supposed to produce new knowledge. And yet, with all the existing tools and processes for communication and cooperation, processes that gave us the Internet, the Web, and most of what’s good about them, in academia, in terms of our working processes, ways of cooperation, we still mostly operate as if very little of this open volunteer based cooperation has actually happened – we mostly ignore it.

Discipline of Information Systems is not isolated in ‘ leaders explicitly advising new faculty not to innovate if they want a career’ (Whitworth and Friedman 2009a), and anti-innovation culture starts earlier. I was part of a class of twenty, first year PhD students at the Sociology department, London School of Economics in 2008, given the same advice. To increase our chances of being published, we were advised not to innovate, but instead stick to what is familiar, in order to make it easy for editors to accept our work. Avoidance of innovation and risk taking and conformance to the publishing system which discourages it, is now part of the academic training in some disciplines.

Instead of enabling better cooperation, which is the key for knowledge production, Internet and electronic tools are used in academic institutions increasingly to enlarge and multiply bureaucratic procedures, regulations and managerial control, changing university radically in the process (Dyer-Witheford 2005). That seems to be the trend (Sievers 2008:242-3). While managers are imposing more control in many aspects (Bousquet 2008:12-13, 59-70), we need to ask why is it that academics are so slow in adapting those new tools and processes. One aspect, which this paper does not deal with, and which requires a separate study, is possible use for the improvement of internal processes with the university departments: self-governance, labour relations, and organization of work in all aspects. The other aspect is the production of knowledge, most of it revolving around writing and publishing in journal papers. Is situation as extremely rotten as this recent paper boldly states?

Academics are now gate–keepers of feudal knowledge castles, not humble knowledge gardeners. They have for over a century successfully organized, specialized and built walls against error. [...] As research grows, knowledge feudalism, like its physical counterpart, is a social advance that has had its day. (Whitworth and Friedman 2009a)

Open Access movement and academic blogging are examples of the positive adoption, and it inspired me to get involved and start recently writing in open, on blogs, about Open Access. However, blogging is limited to individuals working on their own, linking and having discussion through comments [1]. It does not apply the full software-networking Internet model, which is not a surprise – it is not meant to be about collective, organised, prolonged production work. Still, i am tempted to argue that blogs, pingbacks (Langridge and Hickson 2002), discussions in comments (Adio et al. 2009), intense circulation of new posts and comments via RSS (RSS Advisory Board 2009) amongst clusters of inter-linked blogs, are all elements of an early form of open-process cooperation developing in academia. Not developing in an institutional setting, but, for now, in a self-administered, out-of-institutions, way. Which is a good thing; it carries the volunteer-core spirit, an essential part of the Internet Model open-process aspect. I would not fully agree that ‘science is already a wiki [...] just a really, really inefficient one – the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace’ (Wilbanks 2009). However, there are several aspects of wikis, blogs and comments that could lend itself well to creation of new forms of scientific production that could be a step forward from the current journal model. Hence, my below argument for adding a new type of journal article, one suitable to a faster, more responsive, easier to asses, production of theory, more suitable to how we live and work today. However, adding a new type of academic article to the existing publishing models is not sufficient. We need to change the publishing processes too, to make this possible.

Within the boundaries, key concepts, that define the Open Access (OA) movement, the possibilities of opening up, radically changing for better, the actual processes of academic production and publishing, based on the reuse of the existing models developed in software and networking, are limited. Hence, i will leave out the more detailed direct comparison with the OA. The reasons for change are many and developed in detail below. While i fully agree with OA goals, and i am working on implementing and promoting them, OA falls much too short of what, given the models and tools we have at our disposal, could and should be done in academia.

Primary limitation of OA is focusing on the Open Source paradigm and its central attribute: openness of the final product. Which is not a surprise, given that this was the most dominant concept signifying the success of software and networking communities at the time of creation of the OA ideas.

Today, i claim, we need a paradigm shift. Even if OA did incorporate most of the main methodological points about the cooperation that Open Source was representing, it still would not have been enough. Open Source is a very limited subset of methodology that made software and networking communities so successful. By successful i mean inspiring hundreds of thousands of international volunteers engaging in various cooperative models of creating high quality software and sets of ground breaking network protocols, and further inspiring even larger number of people in other spheres to reuse and adopt some of their methods. To re-capture what was lost in the Open Source, we need an Open Process and The Internet Model to replace it, and thus to expose the world to the revolutionary potential of the re-use of these models in many spheres of society, particularly in knowledge production. I will focus here on what i think ought to be done to improve what academic publishing already do, with the focus on the work of journals.

Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages

The following benefits could be gained with open-process publishing and peer reviewing:

1) Quality of submissions would increase a lot over time – because new authors would see the history of the entire process and learn from it (archive of all submissions, peer reviews, editorial board comments, etc). In addition, because they would be less likely to submit badly written texts with no adjustments to publicly stated journal guidelines – a big problem for editors, i am told repeatedly, is the large amount of low quality initial submissions. In the current system, with externally invisible submissions, the reputation cost of submission for authors it too low: they can submit any rubbish without adjusting it to the journal’s guidelines. The only people who see these disrespectful acts (towards work of editors, especially volunteer work), and who associate it with author’s name, are editors. If submissions were openly visible, the cost of submitting random, unadjusted, low quality, undeveloped papers would be far higher, since such disrespectful behaviour would be publicly linked to the author. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physic journal has been operating an open, two-stage peer review process for years, and the results do confirm the logic of my hypothesis:

‘public peer review and interactive discussion deter authors from submitting low-quality manuscripts, and thus relieve editors and reviewers from spending too much time on deficient submissions. [..] The deterrent is particularly important, because reviewing capacities are the most limited resource in the publication process.’(Koop 2006)

2) Quality and innovation in published texts would increase too – because of the above point one, and because opening of the whole, or most, of the publishing process would improve the quality of peer and editorial board reviews, for the same reputation cost reasons stated in the point one. Doing low quality, superficial peer or editorial reviews would be publicly exposed and vice versa – possibility of lost, or gained reputation as an editor or peer reviewer would be a motivating factor [2]. In the current model, all of that work is visible only to those few who participate [3]. In one of the widest researches, review of 68 papers concerning peer review, a rather depressing picture is painted. At the time of writing it, Armstrong has been professor for over thirty years, founding two journals and acting on fourteen editorial boards. He puts emphasis on the anonymity aspect of reviewing and the lack of reward, thus confirming what i concluded speculatively: ‘reviewers generally work without extrinsic rewards. Their names are not revealed, so their reputations do not depend on their doing high quality reviews’. Although ’reviewers typically have less experience with the problem than do the authors ‘, they don’t contribute with any new data nor analyses, they spend between two and six hours doing it, often after waiting for months to do it. Overall, reviewers use their opinion against the scientific work of authors, often differing from other reviewers (Armstrong 1997:5). To complicate the whole thing further, academics are impressed by and prefer ‘complex procedures’ and ‘obscure writing’. Amongst several suggestions Armstrong makes is to have authors nominate one of the reviewers. This is especially important for innovative work, type of work that provides ‘useful and important new findings that advance scientific knowledge [...] which typically conflicts with prior beliefs’, and requires a paradigm shift (Armstrong 1997:2). Another suggestion he makes is open peer reviewing, since ‘disclosure of reviewer identity allows for a deeper dialogue among interested parties [...] while once the article is pronounced “peer reviewed” and published, there is little record of the process and no means of further development’ (Phillips, Bergen, and Heavner 2009). Such open process would create lasting relationships and build reputation for good reviewers. The logic of reputation works well in life in general, it can work well via online tools too – Ebay is a good example of quite a successful model of attaching behaviour to a name closely. Peer reviewers could still easily stay anonymous, if they choose so – they could send their review to editors who could forward it to the open-process system. In that case, they lose the reputation they could have gained for a signed well done reviewing.

3) Journals who implement this process well would attract more agile and risk taking authors – because through the open-process publishing it makes more sense for authors to take more risks (might sound counter-intuitive at first), be less within the known/accepted knowledge boundaries, since they can rely on the peer and editorial assessments of their work done in public. This in turn can lead to less politically correct, career-opportunist position taking from both authors and reviewers and to an opportunity for more bold leaps from both sides. In short, openness would steer reviewing assessment to be more focused on the merit of the work assessed, hence the authors can be more confident in submitting such, more risk taking, less compromise driven works. This would lead us away from ‘The modern academic system that has become almost a training ground for conformity’ (Whitworth and Friedman 2009a), and away from publish and perish devaluing model whose low-risk, but well-referenced style of writing has made overall research difficult to assess. It would encourage ground-breaking authors to publish their new research early and suppress mediocre authors who often, by the sheer number of low-risk publications, prosper in the current play-it-safe system. They develop careers by such – for the knowledge production suffocating (it clogs the production, editors, reviewers, publishers, they all waste time) and for individual careers thriving (it gets authors jobs and research grants) – volume publishing. Armstrong’s research again confirmed this: since wide variety of research points out it is common for reviewers to reject ground-breaking papers, ‘it is more rewarding (for researchers) to focus on their own advancement rather than the advancement of science. Why invest time working on an important problem if it might lead to controversial results that are difficult to publish?’(Armstrong 1997:15)

If open-process publishing were widely spread, re-writing of the same papers for different journals, again for the sake of careerism, to get research points and an extra publication, would be far easier to spot and expose. The current opaque system makes it easy for low-risk careerists, although Open Access is contributing to that changing for better. Open Process would reduce it drastically. If mailing lists were an early implementation model (submissions, editorial and peer reviews, revisions, everything is sent to an open mailing list – see below for the how it would work), spotting a submission which is a rewritten version of an already published paper would be simple. We could use any good web search engine to check for key paragraphs, concepts with author’s name, and it would be soon clear whether the author has already published on the topic, where and exactly what. Simultaneously, participation of the wider community of reviewers would increase the chance of innovative, risk taking, work being spotted and it would help to develop it and publish it (J Beel and B Gipp 2008) [4].

4) Journals that implement this process well would significantly raise the dynamics/pace of research – because some of the most in-depth debates that now happen on academic blogs [5] could thanks to the faster and open-process peer reviewing and commenting be integrated into journals in some form. The form could be shorter, still referenced as academic papers are, and arguments even more focused that those in an average 8000 paper. My impression is that most journal papers revolve around few core ideas (often a single one), not necessarily always connected as closely as to require a single paper. Today, i believe that some of these ideas originate in blog posts. We could enable those high quality 700-800 words blog posts to be submitted, first as rough drafts, and then in a fully referenced short, still burst alike, form of 1500-2000 words [6]. Since the argument would be shorter and more focused, it would be easier to evaluate it, which would mean shorter turn around peer reviewing and publishing, and hence sooner possibility of those whose work relates to it to respond [7]. The cycle of publishing would thus follow more closely the way we research, especially for senior academics for whom: ‘research is often done when a few precious hours can be salvaged from a deluge of other responsibilities’ (Weber 1999). It would also contribute to possibly avoiding the destiny of: ‘Many journal papers are out of date before they are even published’; with a rather frustrating truth that many experience personally: ’In the glacial world of academic publishing one rejection can delay publication by two–four years’ (Whitworth and Friedman 2009a). In addition to this, there are situations when a rapid response of scientists could be immensely beneficial (Varmus 2009). PLoS Currents is a recently started project to provide a platform for fast publishing of scientific papers on specific issues (worldwide H1N1 influenza A virus outbreak is the first one(Public Library of Science n.d.)), using board of expert moderators instead of in-depth peer review in order to get papers shared as rapidly as possible [8].

5) Journals would gain readership and reputation – because of all the above and because of below internal benefits and their public visibility. That is, given that they remain in a form which still justifies calling them journals. Several authors consider that the future of academic publishing will be focused on articles, with a possibility of moving towards ‘public research environments’ (Mietchen 2009) that will be displacing the notion of journals. One thing is more certain, that journals do not have a single future (Nielsen 2009c). Different platforms are already emerging and we will be seeing more of it in the near future. Scientific blogs are places where emerging models are discussed. There are big problems for a more collaborative model to emerge. Academic journal publishing is a hugely profitable industry (Cope and Kalantzis 2009) achieving its profits by a paradox of privatization of the work done by communities funded mostly by the state, selling the access to it back to those who produce it via library subscriptions. In health sciences and within most established institutions ‘the current publication and review process is controlled and fiercely defended by those who benefit from it’ (Phillips et al. 2009). For Nielsen, for radically open collaboration, science lacks both tools (infrastructure) and incentives: why would one write and comment on blogs if that does not count when grants and jobs are given (Nielsen 2009a). Perhaps that is true in physics, where he works, although i doubt it. I believe cooperation on blogs and comments, and the existing journal system, can and do co-exist for the benefit of the participants in both producing better work and in enhancing their careers. For example, early exposure of this piece on the blog resulted in the text being improved. Benjamin Geer and i started from some opposing views. However, after few rounds of clarifications in the blog comments i understood his main concerns about having in the open early versions of the text which are not ready, and which might have major flaws that the author will address as the work progresses. It led to Geer making a concrete proposal how to improve. An important concern was addressed and the model i started creating here was significantly improved – thanks to the work being done on the blog in an early stage, and thanks to both of us willing to discuss, trying understand each other ideas and concerns. On the back of the early release, i also got a presentation at a conference accepted [9], an invitation to give lecture to students in my department based on the text, encouragements to submit the text to a journal, and further suggestions for improvements. I integrated some of the suggestions and i’m submitting the text to a journal. Clearly, so far, i benefited a lot from an early exposure and from developing it in the open. It also did not limit my publishing options, quite the opposite, i think that it has increased them – although we will be able to tell this only with hindsight, once the text is published or rejected.

It is important to note that this type of open work and early releasing is not always possible, and i realized it immediately, while writing another political text during the same weeks when i was writing this one. This confirms that there will be different platforms, writing and cooperative scenarios and methodologies, for different situations, scientific fields and communities. Our thinking has to be open, if we are to increase the possibility of benefiting from the rupture of the centuries old model of scientific collaboration and publishing. A journal that would provide the environment (a mailing list with certain cultural safeguard, as we suggested below, would suffice) for early discussions like the one that happened on my Hack the State blog would gain readership and reputation. Some authors, for some texts, would gladly expose their early drafts in such environment.

Internal benefits for journals

In addition, there are enormous internal benefits for journal, all of which would contribute to their increased organizational health and development:

1) Clearer structure and visibility of tasks and processes contributes to recognizing own most important workers – due to breaking of a large task (publish a new issue) down in a set of defined and openly recorded smaller steps, more precise and transparent allocation of tasks and responsibilities exposes who does what, how and when. This is crucial, since such practice, system, structure of work, rewards those who do more, better and timely work. In organizations, especially in volunteer ones (most editorial boards/collectives in social sciences and humanities), recognizing contribution, and lack of it, is one of the keys for the survival and improvement of the project. Often, in projects where the structure of openly defined, recorded and visible smaller tasks does not exist, it happens that the majority of recognition for the work collectively done falls to the wrong people i.e. to those who have better social connections, who are in a more visible position within the communities in which the journal/project operates. This default mode of disorganization is a source of constant damage for the project. It kills the spirit, rightly, of harder working, most important, participants. In addition, it frequently makes them either imitate the behaviour of those who collect the recognition (contribute less, collect more reputation towards your career progress), or it makes them leave the project. This in turn requires constant recruitment of new project members either who will be blind to the unjust distribution of rewards (reputation), or who will accept it as it is. If we can take is as relevant, given the differences in the fields of operation, a recent research has shown that contributors to popular websites (Youtube.com, Digg.com) are motivated by the attention they get. The attention comes from the volume of contributions. Users who get no attention tend to stop (Wu, Wilkinson, and Huberman 2009). Although the work of a contributor to Youtube.com is significantly different from a volunteer in a collectively produced journal, there are some parallels. Translated in our context here, it suggests that making the work on tasks visible and interactive publicly (open-process publishing key point) is likely to award most attention to those who do most of it, which is a positive outcome for any project that relies on retaining the most productive members.

2) Increased focus on implementation work and continuously carried out processes. Defining the workflow steps and stages exposes what is the necessary implementation work that has to be continuously carried out. It puts emphasis on the organizations, group, collective as a set of ongoing processes. It also exposes other kinds of work as less important, and hence those who do it as less essential for the existence of the project and the group.
Many volunteer loosely structured groups suffer from participants who talk and communicate a lot, often object a lot as well, but contribute little to the implementation work tasks. Frequently, these participants hinder other key group members – on whose contribution the project and group rely on – from getting on with their tasks. Reducing the influence of talk and communication intensive participants who do not contribute much to the implementation work is highly positive for the survival, development and quality of the work produced.

In other words, structured open processes make it possible for an organization, collective, group to not be open and welcoming to any kind of participation, internally nor externally, but be selective instead. More of this kind of openness means more structure, more internalised working discipline, more commitment, and more ability to improve cooperation with precision. In a slightly more abstract terms, the more a whole is exposed, defined, and its workings and operations known and visible, the more likely we can adjust it, reshuffle it, to make it do what participants in the whole want it to do. Open processes enable this, hence open-process in the name. Closed processes allow more corruption of organizational goals: the less we know about the processes, components and their relations, the more individuals can utilise the results of collective work, or of work of others, for own goals and benefits (in academia, careerism).

In Free Software terms, long-term freedoms to act and produce collectively do not come cheaply, and have to be defined, developed and defended. The key pre-requisite for the four Free Software freedoms (defined as ethical demands) to cooperate and share is universal free access to software source code. What is missing from the Free Software definition (although it was frequently present in Richard Stallman’s work, and in the work of software and networking communities) to give us an accurate picture of the cooperative model discussed here, is what is visible from the Internet Engineering Task Force principles (IETF, see below).

In short, to explain the success of the Internet model, having the source code is not sufficient. Other key components must be present: defined goals, open participation (anyone can join) and work processes, respect for and focus on competence, volunteering core, rough consensus and running code decision making principle (voting used only in extreme circumstances) and defined responsibilities (protocol ownership, in IETF case, maintainer in FS case, or package maintainer in the case of GNU/Linux distributions).

This is precisely why Open Access (OA) concept and movement are not enough, nor was it their goal to implement a successful open volunteer cooperation on the trail of the Internet software-networking model. Put briefly, a specific organizational model is necessary too. Using the Open Source paradigm, a business friendly and self-declared ethics-free [10] version of Free Software, is even more misleading, because of its emphasis on the source code alone. It is the least useful model and concept to help here, since it lacks both explicitly defined ethics – which makes it possible in the first place to define, develop and defend sharing, and cooperation in Free Software – and a defined organizational model. To explain this successful model, i propose a following formula: The Internet Model = Free Software + IETF. In other words: software + networking. Or, even better: ethics + organization.

To the existing Internet Model, i would add the following attributes as highly beneficial: first, a mapped workflow of all working groups, components and their relations, and second, a defined decision making, participation and exclusion processes. The first one can be done through splitting of the work in stages (recognizable, definable points in collaboration), designating working groups with known tasks and participants, and mapping their relations, their inter-processes, so that dependencies between the stages, working groups and other components of total group activity are visible. All of this is geared towards enabling and focusing on openness of processes and on the contributions of those who carry out most of the implementation work. Since such type of work is the blood stream of collective work: without its movement, groups, collectives, organizations cannot produce. With open processes at each stage of work, possibility for new workers joining and participating in only selected parts of the overall production opens up.

3) Easier project management – increased task modularity and status (full status of submission = stage + state, see below) real-time visibility (anyone can anytime check the stage and state of any submission on the web system used ) allows for better project management, easier allocation, delegation of tasks, and a more precise sense of progress and problems. All beneficial for the general work spirit, time and resource assessments, and to keep authors who submit papers, and all other parties involved, informed correctly at all times about the full status of the submission.

4) Decision making into the hands of the people who matter most – because who does what, when and how becomes visible, and because those who carry out continuously implementation work matter most for the organization, decision making can be more in their hands. For example, Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) addresses this by defining a volunteer, and hence defining decision makers, through work contributions: ‘MIA volunteers are people who have, in the most recent six-month period, made at least three separate contributions over a period of three weeks to six months’.(Marxist Internet Archive Admin Committee 2009)

In the Open Organizations project, we defined this similarly: ‘anyone doing implementation work in the group, or has done such work in the recent past (e.g. within the past two months), can participate in its decision making’ (Geer, Malter, and Prug 2005b).

5) Attract new volunteers and reduce impact of the existing counter-productive internal participants – utilizing the above task and process openness and visibility, journal editorial boards could use decision making rules similar to MIA to attract volunteers. Through linking of decision making rights and defined implementation work, it would be recognized that certain type of work that could be done by external participants matters more than mere presence of existing internal talk and communication intensive participants. To reduce risk, only certain decision making rights can be given to new participants to start with, until existing board is not assured they are fit to carry out editorial work along journal’s long term goals and strategies. This opens up groups and projects for new participants who would from the beginning adopt the culture (habits) of doing the implementation work, while simultaneously reducing detrimental influence. It could also lead to justified exclusion, or sidelining, of existing internal talk and communication intensive participants. In the context of volunteer self-managed groups, this is a positive culture to develop. Existing software, like the Open Journal System (OJS) could be extended to enable this process to happen. An option for privacy, with reasons stated, could be added to the open-process workflow.

Modular process: stages and states

To summarise, open-process academic publishing would amount to the following being open: initial submission, editorial collective and individual comments, peer reviews, further peer comments, author comments back to reviewers, all the subsequent drafts, and the final published or rejected text.

One objection is that authors would want only their final version used and quoted, or to have the last final version clearly recognised and marked as the final one. A way to both increase the chances of that, and to modularise and define the work in a way to create conditions for the above open processes and their benefits, would be to introduce the concept of submission stage-and-state, using software web tools at our disposal to implement it. So that it is clear that when a submission comes in (in an openly visible web queue, imagine it like an RSS feed on the side bar of a website), it is at the stage called First Draft. As the submission moves through the stages of the publishing process, its full status changes accordingly. This defines our publishing workflow. Each stage could be in one of the two states: a) in the process (state = awaiting), or b) written (state = received) – both as seen from the perspective of journal editors. We could call full status its stage and state (awaiting or received) together. Awaiting and received states of each stage can be an important functional addition, so that involved parties can be notified when the state of a stage changes. For example, when the editorial board sends the paper for peer reviews, full status could read First Draft, Peer Review (awaiting). When the reviews come back, full status could change to First Draft, Peer Review (received). Here is how the whole workflow could look like, with each stage having its own queue containing all of the papers in that stage: 1. First Draft – incoming article, initial submission; 2. First Draft, Editorial Review – assigned to the next round of editorial board review (awaiting), and editorial review complete (received); 3. First Draft, Peer Review – sent for peer reviewing (awaiting), and peer review complete (received).

When required, the process could continue repeating the same steps, starting from the Second Draft, until the editorial board final decision on the paper is reached. Each journal would need to decide on its own stages, and it would be interesting to see differences in editorial models becoming visible. The key is to have the stages defined and ordered, no matter what they are. OJS, which give us a fine grained, yet clear, chart of the workflow that the software enables, can be a good starting point (Public Knowledge Project 2008:12). To clarify: a stage is a defined key step in the publishing process. Each stage can be in one of the pre-defined states. Full status is stage + state. It tells us the location of submitted paper in the process, what is currently going on with it, and whose turn is it to act on it.

If the editor in charge of the paper peer reviewing process decides that a new revision is required, status could be changed to Second Draft (awaiting). Changing of the stage and state of the submission could be done with an action as simple as editor changing the drop down menus with available stages and its belonging states. Web system would automatically do the required action – OJS does this already within its defined workflow. For example, when an editor changes the stage of submission to Second Draft (awaiting), it would send peer reviews received for the first draft and a note to the author (email CC the editor). Simultaneously, ‘Recent Changes’ – a web page which would, like on wiki systems, record each stage and state change of all the papers currently in the process – could be updated. When a new draft based on addressing the points raised in peer reviews is received (web submission by the author), full status automatically changes to Second Draft (received); etc, until we get to the Published, Rejected stage – or some more fine grained final outcome full status.

I have not used proprietary software for web based journals but i would be surprised if something like this already does not exist. However, although such existing proprietary systems to manage academic publishing process were not designed to enable open collaboration based on this model, we can still, and should, learn from them. More importantly, picture i presented here is a quite developed system. We do not need to wait to get to that point of software development in order to start developing our writing and publishing practices according to the currently existing tools and on-line cooperative models.

Existing tools, as simple (or, as complex, with thousands of plugins and themes) as this blog and freely available wikis and content management systems (Drupal, Joomla) can be customized well enough to enable us to start working using open-process collaborative practices with a significant degree of labour saving automation and other benefits now. Many of web systems that we could start using now to implement some aspects of this proposal are available in commercial hosting packages with high levels of fine grained point-and-click installation, backup and administration for less than few hundred pounds per year. This includes all the Internet bandwidth that an average journal might need, and in comparison to what was available only few years ago, it is a huge increase in affordability of web systems. It is the human element – seeing the potentially positive benefits, seeing them being larger than the risks associated with those changes and the risk of remaining in current closed models, changing the habits of editorial boards – that is the biggest obstacle. Finding the right web based technology is far less of a problem: we could improvise to start with simplest solutions, and add complexity later, in small incremental steps. By doing so, we would follow one of the most fundamental architectural, design principles of building the Internet over the past decades, simplicity: ‘3.5 Keep it simple. When in doubt during design, choose the simplest solution’ (Carpenter 1996).

What if software was developed through closed models?

If the currently existing closed academic publishing models were used instead of the open-process cooperation, it is very unlikely that we would have ended up with the software that runs the blog on which first versions of this text were written. Wordpress has 7100+ available plugins that can be installed with a click on web interface – self-hosted installation is required, and in the case of vast majority of plugins no further technical knowledge is needed. It is even less likely that we would have ended up with open protocols (Internet Engineering Task Force 2009; Internet Mail Consortium n.d.) and networks that enabled standardised networking that we know as the Internet today.

Here’s how a close collaboration could have looked like without the software and networking communities we had since 1970’s, without hackers, without Internet Engineering Task Force, Free Software and Open Source production:

• Most likely, the Internet in today’s form would not have existed. Instead, we would have had closed, commercial (pay to view), competing networks, where the exchange between the networks would have been in many cases impossible, and expensive and not affordable to many. There were commercial attempts to close the World Wide Web in separate networks, both in its early phase (AOL), and during the height of broadband expansion (an option, danger, that was discussed at the time).

• Open mailing lists as central hubs where work on software, networks and protocols is debated would not exists.

• IRC/online chat channels devoted to those projects would not exist.

• All communication on patches (Wall n.d.) prior to the patch submissions (Bird, Gourley, and Devanbu 2007): problems, improvements, priorities, suggestions, ideas would be strictly between software source code maintainers and new contributors, and not in any way open, visible, to other contributors, nor to the public. Generations of software and network engineers could not learn from each other’s publicly available work and detailed discussions, but would have to rely only on learning through educational institutions and employment. Overall, in comparison with today’s model, it would all happen in the condition of extreme isolation.

• Comments in the source code (Kotula 2000) (part of the cooperation in engineering and often of the submission process too) would not exist, or it would be invisible to anyone other than employees of the companies producing it.

• There would be no blogs, nor news stories commenting on discussions that happen on mailing lists and other places of cooperative software and networking production. Instead, we would rely on PR coming from companies that produce the software.

• Most likely, neither blogs, nor wikis (Cunningham 2009) would have been invented in the first place, or they would have been a minor, undeveloped software niches.

• Only the final executable software would be available. Perhaps, in some cases, the final source would be available too, but for different purposes than it is today.

For those who have participated in open-process software and networking cooperation and those who know how it works: this closed version is a depressing picture, one that would give us neither the software, nor the Internet as we know it today. Especially not the amount of people involved in building it, nor the diversity of applications we have today.

If you have not had the privilege of participating in any of this, and if you have any doubts about how exactly the Internet was built, and what am i referring to, here are the working principles of the IETF. It is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The IETF Mission Statement is documented in RFCC 3935 (H. Alverstrand 2004), and it operates on those principles, worth quoting in full (WG = working group):

• Open process – any interested person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is our commitment to making our documents, our WG mailing lists, our attendance lists, and our meeting minutes publicly available on the Internet.

• Technical competence - the issues on which the IETF produces its documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to technically competent input from any source. Technical competence also means that we expect IETF output to be designed to sound network engineering principles – this is also often referred to as ‘engineering quality’.

• Volunteer Core – our participants and our leadership are people who come to the IETF because they want to do work that furthers the IETF’s mission of “making the Internet work better”.

• Rough consensus and running code – We make standards based on the combined engineering judgment of our participants and our real-world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.

• Protocol ownership – when the IETF takes ownership of a protocol or function, it accepts the responsibility for all aspects of the protocol, even though some aspects may rarely or never be seen on the Internet. Conversely, when the IETF is not responsible for a protocol or function, it does not attempt to exert control over it, even though it may at times touch or affect the Internet.

If you are an academic, or a student, try thinking of the open-process knowledge publishing and production proposals this way: if the above working principles had not existed, we would not have had the Internet, the blog on which this text was developed, nor most tools you use in daily life and work to communicate and cooperate. I doubt you would prefer such situation. If you would not, why not implement similar open processes in academia. If we are to judge open-process cooperation models by the results in software and networking protocols, we are missing a lot in the knowledge production by staying closed. I am not blind to political consequences of this proposal, quite the contrary, but discussing it would take too long – i’ll leave that for other texts.

Have no doubt, i see (clearly enough to keep working on showing its plausibility) a future of volunteer driven, open process direct-and-participatory democratic state-forms along the lines of this proposal, but that too, is a matter for a different text. Changing closed (closed given the existing opportunities for radically more open cooperation) academic publishing, bringing it where it could be in the light of existing volunteer driven open-process cooperation, in the age of the Internet Model production, is enough for a single text.

One of the most important reasons why the IETF and Free Software spread and were successful is because the results were immediately (or soon enough for people to notice, value it, and join the work) visible and operational (working examples). The same principle cannot be applied to theory, at least not in social sciences and humanities: we cannot see a theory implemented, working quickly. However, we can make the processes of open cooperation immediately operational and visible through adoption and development of open-process methods.

A Simple Transition: the Linux kernel development process

The above elaboration is perhaps too complex to be implemented straight away, to be the next step in a move from a closed access journal, to an open-process one. Ideally, we need a simple transition model. A model that will require a minimum amount of both additional labour and capital investment at the beginning (most editorial boards are volunteers already stretched to limits), and that will scale, if required, at a later stage. As Benjamin Geer correctly suggested, Linux kernel development process is one such model. It is well tested as it has been working well for over a decade in software.

Here’s how would such model work: the editor has gathered a group of scholars who have the time and interest to do peer review; Linus Torvalds, main author of Linux kernel calls them his ‘lieutenants’. There is an open mailing list, and a web site that says: ‘If you want to publish an article in this journal, you must propose your idea on the mailing list before you write the article.’

People show up on the mailing list and say things like, ‘I’m thinking of writing an article explaining X, etc., etc.’ The lieutenants (and the other subscribers) say, ‘That won’t work unless you deal with Y somehow. Also, you’ve assumed that X=Q, which is doubtful. Go and read Z and think about it some more.’ Thus they prevent submissions that are based on ignorance, well-known fallacies, etc. And they do this much more quickly than traditional peer review, because they don’t have to read an 8,000-word article to find out that there’s a serious problem: they can find and fix bugs at the design stage rather than the implementation stage. As it is well known, it is much cheaper and quicker to fix bugs at the design stage. Indeed, to improve peer reviewing, some of Armstrong’s suggestions are very close to ours: ‘With an early acceptance procedure, researchers could find out whether it was worthwhile to do research on a controversial topic before they invested much time. An additional benefit of such a review is that they receive suggestions from reviewers before doing the work and can then improve the design.’ (Armstrong 1997:17)

After the initial discussion, the authors then go away and produce rough drafts, which can be incomplete, or even just outlines with implementation notes (data to be gathered later, etc.). He posts the draft back to the mailing list. Then people on the list say, ‘OK, that looks better, but you need to make sure you deal with A’s argument, and get data on B, etc.’ Thus by the time an author submits an actual article, the editor and the peer reviewers already have a pretty good idea of what’s in it. The author also has a good idea of how receptive the reviewers are to the article, and thus how likely it is to be published. This helps everyone avoid wasting time on submissions that have no chance of being accepted, and yet, most important, the quality control role of the peer reviewing process is maintained.

The lieutenants do not have to do all the reviewing themselves, because authors comment on each other’s works in progress on the list. It’s in their interest to do so, because the tougher they are on each other, the less likely it is that flawed articles will slip through the process, and the better the journal’s reputation will become, thus making it a more prestigious place to get published. This means less work for the lieutenants. It also means development of a community of peer reviewers whose interest becomes to increase the reputation of a journal in which they publish.

Instead of publishing issues on a regular basis, the journal can publish each article electronically whenever it is ready. Articles get published when the community consensus is that they’re good enough to publish. At any given time, if there are no finished articles, the journal does not have to publish anything; thus there is no pressure to lower standards or to rush the process in order to meet a deadline.

A print issue can be treated as the ‘Best of’, or a special/themed issue, containing only a selection of what has been published on-line. This process would make a journal a lively place of activity, with authors being always kept up to date with what is going on with their submissions, and with a possibility for any journal reader to get engaged, on a volunteer basis, through this open process.

Over time, the editor should become more of a coordinator, like Linus, whose role is mainly to establish a general editorial line (e.g. it’s a political journal, and not one on culture, yet papers and issues on culture are welcome if done from angles productive for political debates and issues) and to arbitrate between the lieutenants when they disagree.

All that is needed for this process to start being used is an open mailing list. For early stage ideas, author can write emails directly to the mailing list – reviews can be done by replies. In a later stage, authors can email Word or Open Office documents, and reviewers can use commenting features, the system everyone is familiar with.

There is a ready available slightly more advanced option, a Wordpress plugin that enables online commenting of the text written in blog pages, where comments appear sideways to the paragraph being commented on (Fitzpatrick 2007). There are plenty examples on their website, check the The Iraq Study Group Report with comments. The fanciest cutomized interface for this extension is the one used for the McKenzie Wark’s 2007 Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press) book. Pages are shown like a deck of cards, there are arrows underneath for next/previous navigation, and on the right hand side is the scrolling box with comments.

To make it simple to start with, all that is needed is an open, archived, easy to backup, mailing list. Other parts of the open process can be improved later. However, it is important to remember that Wordpress and Drupal could be a good extension of the mailing list. Hosting for both is cheaply available, and in the case of Wordpress, there is point-and-click backup and restore functionality. For the needs of most academics, blogging software provides incredibly richly and easily (minimal, often no, technical knowledge required) extensible cooperation platform. It is a vast collection of multiple functions providing impact far greater than several separate pieces of individual software.

Open-process peer reviewing and citing early drafts

There is one significant problem with the processes as open as we are suggesting here. Although authors might like the more extensive peer reviewing that is likely to happen on an open mailing list, it is to expect that most of them would not want to have their work cited, nor used anywhere, before the final version accepted by the journal isn’t ready. Or, at minimum, before they post a copy publicly for reviews on their blog, as some authors do. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prevent that with technical solutions. Yet, there is a cultural safeguard parallel from the Linux kernel development that we can reuse.

If a Linux kernel is released with a serious bug, people get annoyed, and the author of the offending code might be publicly embarrassed. However, if you post buggy code on the Linux kernel mailing list and someone notices, the worst thing that will happen to you is that you will have to fix it. Why? Because everyone knows, it is not safe to download source code from mailing lists and expect it to work properly. This is a cultural thing: it is accepted that free-software mailing lists are for hashing out ideas, not for finished work. Everything about them screams: ‘Danger, Construction Work’.

Therefore, we think that peer review could be open (also suggested by Armstrong) if it had the right cultural safeguards. There would have to be some principle like ‘respect for peer review’, which meant that citing journal-mailing-list messages and preliminary drafts in academic articles would be considered a huge taboo. Academic ethics would have to include the idea that you can criticise preliminary drafts as much as you want, but only on the journal-mailing-list. If you want to criticise them anywhere else, you have to wait until the final version, or a draft version approved by the author, is published. In this case, we believe, authors could be made comfortable with proposing preliminary ideas and subsequent drafts on a mailing list, without having to fear that they will be attacked while in the middle of writing.

Final Words

When i started writing this article, i though there are multiple risks, drawbacks, significant additional labour investments, transition plans, and other reasonably raised issues to be addressed, in order for this proposal to make sense to the editorial boards who will be making decisions whether to try adopting elements of open-process academic publishing and peer reviewing, or not. What i found trough research surprised me. I have been convinced that successful journals that do not take risks and change towards open-process participatory publishing in some way, risk losing most. They risk losing relevance in their field to new journals that could capture the attention of academic community in given field if they embrace elements of open-process possibilities as their competitive advantage. In medicine, PLoS One journal started from scratch in 2006. Today, it is one of the largest journals by volume in the world, peer reviewed, open access and with rich use of commenting tools and automatically generated article metrics. Its primary publishing criteria are data and methodology validity, while they leave the originality and importance for readers to judge. Their downside is a highly problematic principle that authors pay publishing costs, although this is somewhat balanced by a fee waiver system and by the reviewers not knowing whether the authors pay or not. More important, PLoS (PLoS 2009), PLoS One and other innovative examples i came across still use only a small part of what open-process paradigm offers. It should not come as a surprise if we see journal success stories based on innovation in publishing and reviewing models in social sciences, humanities and arts soon.

The key claim of this text can now be summed up: best opportunities for enabling cooperative and participatory open-process knowledge production do not arise from a combination of Open Access and article metrics alone, but from the adoption and customization of the open-process paradigm elaborated here. This way, ground-breaking ideas and more cooperative process of knowledge creation will be encouraged.

Notes

[1] There are reputable journals already allowing comments directly in texts, blue squares in the text are user made comments.

[2] See (Kaplan 2005) as an example of a proposal to make reviewers to account for their comments.

[3] See (Fitzpatrick 2010) book draft for an extensive analysis of the problems of anonymity in peer reviewing.

[4] See how peer review functions could be developed and improved with cooperative approach, through a new system Scienstein. For a more technical explanation of Scienstein, see (B. Gipp, J. Beel, and Hentschel n.d.).

[5] See (Nielsen 2009b) See Nielsen, “Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?.”, especially the part where he discussed how New York Times cannot compete in providing scientific writing with plenty of top scientists and their blogs.

[6] (Armstrong 1997:22-23) suggests alternative forms of articles, including publishing electronically peer reviews.

[7] See (Gura 2002:258-260) for an open peer reviewing model which starts with fully finished articles.

[8] See (Mietchen n.d.). In the spirit of Open Process, he provided several excellent comments and references, some of which i incorporated in the text.

[9] CSA 2010, 18th-20th March 2010, Berkeley, USA – presentation in the Technology stream.

[10] Ethics-free claim is entirely untrue. Ethics of Open Source is a capitalist one. See (Prug 2007).

[11] This is an early version, yet widely functional version of plugin installation/removal and activation/deactivation. Its weakest side is that it does not take the list of currently available plugins live, but it instead provides the fixed list with each release (Kukreti n.d.).

[12] Also developed through open cooperative processes with the final results open too – see email standards (Internet Mail Consortium n.d.).

[13] See (Whitworth and Friedman 2009b) example of a democratic knowledge exchange system design (Figure 1) for a complex system.

[14] The idea for this section was provided by Benjamin Geer in the comments of the blog after the initial text version was written there. I used his words verbatim for most of the section. You can see his original contribution on the blog. This kind of cooperation is precisely what the text advocates. It was unexpected, but not a complete surprise, to get an example of the open-process cooperation while writing the text.

[15] See (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Editors n.d.) , where the first draft gets posted on a website for an 8 week long open discussion, after which it gets edited, to finally enter the peer reviewing process.

[16] See (Callaos 2009) as an example of what they call multi-methodological approach, using a combination of top-down and bottom-up, blind and open peer reviewing.

[17] The plugin (Tejeda n.d.) has a new name, Digress, and release, with active development ongoing.

Bibliography

“Kernel Trap.” http://kerneltrap.org/blogs (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Adio, Sarah, Johann Jaud, Bettina Ebbing, Matthias Rief, and Günther Woehlke. 2009. “Dissection of Kinesin’s Processivity.” PLoS ONE 4:e4612.

Armstrong, J. Scott. 1997. “Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation.” Science and Engineering Ethics 3:63-84.

Arnison, Matthew. 2003. “Open publishing is the same as free software.” http://purplebark.net/maffew/cat/openpub.html (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Editors. n.d. “Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics – Review Process.” http://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/review/index.html (Accessed October 4, 2009).

Beel, J, and B Gipp. 2008. “Collaborative Document Evaluation: An Alternative Approach to Classic Peer Review.” Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 31:10.

Biagioli, Mario. 2002. “From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review.” Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures 12:11.

Bird, Christian, Alex Gourley, and Prem Devanbu. 2007. “Detecting Patch Submission and Acceptance in OSS Projects.” P. 26 in Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories. IEEE Computer Society http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1269040 (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How the university works : higher education and the low-wage nation. New York: New York University Press.

Callaos, Nagib. 2009. “Participative Peer-to-Peer Reviewing: PPPR.” Orlando, Florida, USA http://www.iiis2009.org/wmsci/Website/Pptpr.asp?vc=27 (Accessed October 6, 2009).

Carpenter, B. 1996. “RFC 1958 (rfc1958) – Architectural Principles of the Internet.” http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1958.html (Accessed September 23, 2009).

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2009. “Signs of epistemic disruption: Transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal.” First Monday 14. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2309/2163 (Accessed October 5, 2009).

Crocker, Stephen D. 2009. “How the Internet Got Its Rules.” The New York Times, April 7 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Cunningham, Ward. 2009. “Wiki Design Principles.” http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 2005. “Cognitive capitalism and the contested campus.” European Journal of Higher Arts Education. http://www.elia-artschools.org/_downloads/publications/EJHAE/Dyer.pdf.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2007. “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 10.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2010. “One: Peer Review – anonymity.” in Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York University Press http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/one/anonymity/ (Accessed October 7, 2009).

Geer, Richard Malter, and Toni Prug. 2005a. “Introduction to Open Organizations.” http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/IntroToOpenOrg (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Geer, Richard Malter, and Toni Prug. 2005b. “Open Organizations: Guidelines for Volunteer Working Groups.” http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/OpenOrgGuideWgr#Participation (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Gipp, B., J. Beel, and C. Hentschel. n.d. “Scienstein: A research paper recommender system.” Pp. 309–315 in International Conference on Emerging Trends in Computing. http://www.sciplore.org/publications/2009-Scienstein_-_A_Research_Paper_Recommender_System.pdf.

Gura, Trisha. 2002. “Scientific publishing: Peer review, unmasked.” Nature 416:258-260.

H. Alverstrand. 2004. “RFC 3935 – A Mission Statement for the IETF.” http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3935.txt (Accessed August 6, 2009).

Internet Engineering Task Force. 2009. “Official Internet Protocol Standards.” http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcxx00.html (Accessed September 21, 2009).

Internet Mail Consortium. n.d. “IETF Request For Comments defining E-mail.” http://www.imc.org/rfcs.html (Accessed November 7, 2009).

Internet Mail Consortium. n.d. “Internet Mail Standards.” http://www.imc.org/mail-standards.html (Accessed September 21, 2009).

Kaplan, David. 2005. “How to Fix Peer Review.” The Scientist 19:10.

Koop, Thomas. 2006. “An open, two-stage peer-review journal.” Nature. http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature04988.html (Accessed September 23, 2009).

Kotula, Jeffrey. 2000. “Source Code Documentation: An Engineering Deliverable.” P. 505 in Technology of Object-Oriented Languages, International Conference on, vol. 0. Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society.

Kukreti, Utkarsh. n.d. WordPress Plugin Manager. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugin-manager/screenshots/ (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Langridge, Stuart, and Ian Hickson, eds. 2002. “Pingback 1.0 Specification.” http://hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback-1.0 (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Marxist Internet Archive Admin Committee. 2009. “Marxist Internet Acrhive Volunteers.” http://marxists.org/admin/volunteers/index.htm (Accessed September 22, 2009).

Mietchen, Daniel. n.d. “Open-process academic publishing: Some more comments.” http://ways.org/en/blogs/2009/sep/10/openprocess_academic_publishing_some_more_comments (Accessed September 29, 2009).

Mietchen, Daniel. 2009. “What would science look like if it were invented today?.” http://blog.euroscience.org/en/blog/welcome-to-the-euroscientist-246/what-would-science-look-like-if-it-were-invented-today,5061.html (Accessed September 29, 2009).

Nielsen, Michael. 2009a. “Doing science in the open.” Physicsworld.com. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/38904 (Accessed September 29, 2009).

Nielsen, Michael. 2009b. “Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?.” http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/is-scientific-publishing-about-to-be-disrupted/ (Accessed October 3, 2009).

Nielsen, Michael. 2009c. “There is no single future for scientific journals.” http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/there-is-no-single-future-for-scientific-journals/ (Accessed September 29, 2009).

Phillips, Carl, Paul Bergen, and Karyn Heavner. 2009. “Pre-Submission and Post-Publication Reviews as Partial Solutions to the Fundamental Inadequacy of Public Health Science Peer Review.” Orlando, Florida, USA http://www.iiis.org/CDs2008/CD2009SCI/ispr2009/PapersPdf/V563HR.pdf.

PLoS. 2009. “PLoS Progress Report.” http://www.plos.org/downloads/progress_report.pdf.

Prug, Toni. 2007. “Hacking ideologies, part 2: Open Source, a capitalist movement.” http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2311.en.html (Accessed September 15, 2009).

Public Knowledge Project. 2008. “OJS in an Hour.” http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/OJSinanHour.pdf.

Public Library of Science. n.d. “PLoS Currents: Influenza – Rapid Access to Research in Progress.” http://knol.google.com/k/plos/plos-currents-influenza/28qm4w0q65e4w/1# (Accessed September 29, 2009).

RSS Advisory Board. 2009. “RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.11).” http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification (Accessed September 21, 2009).

Sievers, Burkard. 2008. “The psychotic university.” ephemera 8:238.

Suber, Peter. 2007. “Open Access Overview (definition, introduction).” http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Tejeda, Eddie A. n.d. digress.it. http://digress.it/features/ (Accessed October 3, 2009).

Varmus, Harold. 2009. “A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research.” Official Google Blog. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-website-for-rapid-sharing-of.html (Accessed September 29, 2009).

Wall, Larry. n.d. Patch. Free Software Foundation http://directory.fsf.org/project/patch/ (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Weber, Ron. 1999. “The journal review process: a manifesto for change.” Communications of the AIS 2:3.

Whitworth, Brian, and Rob Friedman. 2009a. “Reinventing academic publishing online. Part I: Rigor, relevance and practice.” First Monday 14. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2609/2248 (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Whitworth, Brian, and Rob Friedman. 2009b. “Reinventing academic publishing online. Part II: A socio–technical vision.” First Monday 14. http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2642/2287 (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Wilbanks, John. 2009. “Publishing science on the web.” Common Knowledge. http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge/2009/07/publishing_science_on_the_web.php (Accessed September 20, 2009).

Wu, Fang, Dennis M Wilkinson, and Bernardo A Huberman. 2009. “Feedback loops of attention in peer production.” 0905.1740. http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.1740 (Accessed September 30, 2009).

Acknowledgements

Benjamin Geer, whose early discussion and comments made a key contribution by providing a simple transition model. Daniel Mietchen, whose comments and references provided valuable additional lines of research. Most of their contributions can be seen in their original form in comments at my hackthestate.org blog. Both provided additional feedback to the submitted version of the paper, which helped to sharpen and clarify arguments further. I started writing this paper on the blog as a set of recommendations to the academic journal Historical Materialism, encouraged by discussions with one of their editorial board members, Demet Dinler.

[hide] 1 The Internet Model = why Open Access is not enough 2 Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages 3 Internal benefits for journals 4 Modular process: stages and states 5 What if software was developed through closed models? 6 A Simple Transition: the Linux kernel development process 7 Open-process peer reviewing and citing early drafts 8 Final Words

The Internet Model = why Open [...]]]>

The Internet Model = why Open Access is not enough

This is an early version of the text. Latest version of this text is here.

Publishing and peer review processes in academia are currently closed models. In my view, at least in the areas i operate in (social sciences and humanities), these processes should be far more, if not entirely, open, with a provision for privacy in special cases. I call this model Open-process academic publishing. The name deliberately distinguishes it from Open Access, which refers to only the final outcome of academic knowledge production being open.  The suggestion is not to open the processes in random ways, but in ways in which this openness — fundamentally based on volunteer participation — brings/enables more structure, more internalized working discipline, more commitment, and more ability to improve cooperation/collaboration with deliberate precision – all with the goal of improving the outcomes.  “[...] culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has”, hence, we could call it The Internet Model (software/FS + networking/IETF). Its potential screams for being reused, hacked, for other areas of production. Academia, especially its publishing side, seems to me capable of embracing such volunteer-core open-process cooperation.

The model proposed here brings only few new aspects, mainly those related to the work done in the Open Organizations project. It’s an abstraction, a theoretical development of a model developed for decades in software and networking, and related concepts and practices, especially their open-process part, have been already reused in news production.

What are my motives, you might ask? I’m a first year PhD student, and i’m dreading the idea of being drawn into the existing closed model, model where you mostly, in social sciences and humanities (dozens of journals that i checked), have no idea how long will it take for you submission to be processed, what are the stages in the process and how do you engage with it (other than wait). Quite a few journals do have all these elements stated on their webpages, but it still takes years, it still doesn’t embrace openness for better cooperation, and it still makes no sense to me. I find the current state of academic publishing depressing and unacceptable. The most unacceptable element is that we’re supposed to produce new knowledge. And yet, with all the existing tools and processes for communication and cooperation, processes that gave us the Internet and most of what’s good about it, in academia, in terms of our working processes, ways of cooperation, we still mostly operate as if very little of this open volunteer based cooperation has actually happened – we mostly ignore it.

Instead of enabling better cooperation, which is the key for knowledge production, Internet and electronic tools are used in academic institutions increasingly to enlarge and multiply bureaucratic procedures, regulations and managerial control – that seems to be the trend. Fine, managers are trying to do what they think their jobs are, but what about academics? Why are they not adopting those new tools and processes? Is situation as extremely rotten as this recent paper boldly states:

Academics are now gate–keepers of feudal knowledge castles, not humble knowledge gardeners. They have for over a century successfully organized, specialized and built walls against error.  [...] As research grows, knowledge feudalism, like its physical counterpart, is a social advance that has had its day. (Whitworth, Friedman, First Monday, Volume 14, Number 8 – 3 August 2009)

Open Access movement and academic blogging are examples of the positive adoption, and it inspired me to get involved and start recently writing in open, on blogs, about Open Access. Good quality academic blogging is great, but it is limited to individuals working on their own, linking and having discussion through comments. It doesn’t apply the full software-networking Internet model, which isn’t a surprise – blogging is not meant to be about collective, organised, prolonged production work . Still, i’m tempted to argue that blogs, pingbacks, discussions in comments, intense circulation of new posts and comments (via RSS) amongst clusters of inter-linked blogs, are all elements of an early form of the open-process part of the Internet Model developing in academia – not in an institutional setting, but, for now, in a self-administered, out-of-institutions, way. Which is a good thing – it carries the volunteer-core spirit, an essential part of the Internet Model open-process side. John Wilibanks recently wrote on his blog: “science is already a wiki [...] just a really, really inefficient one – the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace” – it is in this light that i see blogs and blog comments as a new form of scientific production which could be integrated, and improved on, into the institutional setting and journal papers production. Hence my below argument for adding a new type of journal paper, one suitable to a faster, more responsive, easier to asses, production of theory, more suitable to how we work today. However, for this to happen, we can’t just add a new type of academic paper to the existing publishing models. We need to change the publishing processes too, to make this possible.

Within Open Access, the possibility of opening up, radically changing for better, the actual processes of academic production and publishing, based on the existing models developed in software and networking, are dismissed as not relevant, nor required, nor good for the goals of OA initiatives. I have little desire to argue with such positions, since to me they seem to come from a different discursive universe, and we’ll be wasting our energies, trying to reconcile our light-years-separated standing positions. The reasons for change are many and developed in detail below.  The best place for a substantial critique of the existing model and its problems, Reinventing academic publishing online. Part I: Rigor, relevance and practice, was published in First Monday days after i finished writing the first draft of this text – i strongly recommend it as a complementary reading to this text.  While i fully agree with OA goals, and i’m working on implementing and promoting them, OA falls way too short of what, given the models and tools we have at our disposal, could and should be done in the academia.

Primary limitation of OA is focusing on only one part of the Open Source paradigm: openness of the final product. Which is not a surprise, given that this was the most dominant concept signifying the success of the software and networking communities at the time of creation of the OA ideas.

Today,  i claim, we need a paradigm shift. Even if OA did incorporate most of the main methodological points about the collaboration that Open Source was representing, it still would not have been enough. Open Source is a very limited subset of methodology that made software and networking communities so successful. Hence, to re-capture what was lost in the Open Source, we need an Open Process and The Internet Model to replace it, and thus to expose the world to the revolutionary potential of the re-use of these models in many spheres of society, particularly in science.  I will develop in detail the shortcoming of the Open Source model, and reasons for adopting new concepts in a paper i’m currently writing, with the provisional title Open Process & The Internet Model.  As soon an alpha version of the paper is ready, i’ll publish it here on the blog and keep improving it live on the blog, increasing the version number with each improvement, following the practice i started with this text. Here, i’ll focus on what i think ought to done, to improve what academic publishing  already does, with the focuse on the work of journals.

Open-process publishing and reviewing advantages

The following benefits could be gained with open-process publishing and peer reviewing:

1) Quality of submissions would increase a lot over time – because new authors would see the history of the entire process and learn from it (archive of all submissions, peer reviews, editorial board comments, etc), and because they would be less likely to submit badly written texts with no adjustments to publicly stated journal guidelines (a big problem for editors, i get told over and over, is the large amount of low quality initial submissions). In the current system, with externally invisible submissions, the cost of submission for authors it too low: they can submit any rubbish without adjusting it to journal’s guidelines. The only people who see these disrespectful (towards volunteer work of editors) acts, and who associate it with author’s name, are editors. If submissions were openly visible, the cost of submitting random, unadjusted, low quality, undeveloped papers would be far higher, since such disrespectful behavior would be publicly linked to the author.

2) Quality of texts published would increase in general - because of a ) point 1, b) opening of the whole, or most, of the publishing process would also improve the quality of peer and editorial board reviews, for the same reasons like in point 1). Doing low quality, superficial peer or editorial reviews would be publicly exposed and vice versa – possibility of lost, or gained reputation as an editor or peer reviewer would be a motivating factor. In the current model, all of that work is visible only to those few who participate. The logic of reputation works well in life in general, it can work well via online tools too – Ebay is a good example of quite a successful model of attaching behavior to a name closely.

3) Journals who do this process well would attract more agile and risk taking authors - because through open-process publishing it makes more sense for authors to take more risks (might sounds counter-intuitive at first), be less within the known/accepted knowledge boundaries, since they can rely on the peer and editorial assessments of their work done in public – which in turn can lead to less politically correct, career-opportunist position taking from both authors and reviewers, and to an opportunity for more bold, leaps taking steps from both sides. In short, openness would steer reviewing assessment to be more focused on the merit (of course, different academic communities will have different notion of merit in their fields) of the work assessed, hence authors can be more confident in submitting such, more risk staking, less compromise driven works. Which would lead us away from “The modern academic system has become almost a training ground for conformity.” (Whitworth and Friedman, 2009), and away from the publish and perish devaluing model. Model whose low-risk, but well-referenced style of writing has made overall research difficult to asses. It would encourage ground-breaking authors to publish their new research early and suppress mediocre authors who often, by the sheer number of low-risk publications prosper in the current play-it-safe system, and develop careers by such — for the knowledge production suffocating (clogs the production, editors, reviewers publishers, all waste time) and for invidal careers thriving (get’s authors jobs and research grants),  volume publishing. If open-process publishing was widely spread, re-writing of the same papers for different journals, again for the sake of careerism, to get research points and another publication, would be far easier to spot and expose. The current opaque system makes it easy for low-risk careerists, although Open Access is contributing to that changing for better. Open Process would reduce it drastically: if mailing lists were an early implementation model (submissions, editorial and peer reviews, revisions, everything  gets sent to an open mailing list), spotting a submission which is a rewritten version of an already published paper would be trivial: one could use any good web search engine to check  for key paragraphs, concepts with author’s name and it would be in no time clear whether the author has already published on the topic, where and what.

4) Journals who do this process well would significantly raise the dynamics/pace of research - because  some of the most in-depth debates that now happen on academic blogs, could, thanks to the faster and open-process peer reviewing and commenting, move to journals. The form could be shorter, still referenced like academic papers are, and argument even more focused that those in an average 8000 paper are. My impression is that most long journal papers revolve around few core ideas, often not necessarily connected as closely as to necessarily require a single longer paper. Today, i believe that some of these ideas originate in blog posts. We could enable those high quality 700-800 words blog posts to be submitted in a fully referenced short, burst alike, form of 1500-2000 words. Because the argument would be shorter and focused, it would be easier to  evaluate it, which would mean shorter turn around peer reviewing and publishing, and hence sooner possibility of those whose work relates to it to respond. The cycle of publishing would thus follow more closely how we research, especially for senior academics for whom: “research is often done when a few precious hours can be salvaged from a deluge of other responsibilities.”(Weber, 1999).  It would also contribute to possibly avoiding the destiny of: “Many journal papers are out of date before they are even published. “; with a rather frustrating truth that many experience personally: “In the glacial world of academic publishing one rejection can delay publication by two–four years” (Whitworth and Friedman, 2009).

5) Journals would gain readership and reputation – because of all the above and because of below internal benefits and their public visibility

Internal benefits for journals

In addition, there are enormous internal benefits for journals, that would contribute to their increased organizational health and development:

1) Clearer structure and visibility of tasks and processes contributes to recognizing own most important workers - because more precise (due to breaking it down in defined and openly recorded smaller steps) and more transparent allocation of tasks and responsibilities exposes who does what and how, it rewards those who do more and better work – and in volunteer organizations (most editorial boards/collectives), recognizing contribution, and lack of it, is one of the keys for survival and improvement of the organization. Often, it happens that recognition falls to wrong people i.e. to those who have better social connections, who are in the more visible position. And that kills the spirit, rightly, of harder working, most important, participants.

2) Increased focus on implementation work and continuously carried out processes - because defining workflow steps and stages exposes what is the necessary implementation work that has to be continuously carried out – it puts emphasis on an organization/group/collective as a set of ongoing processes. It also exposes other kind of work as less important, and hence those who do it as less essential for the existence of the group/organization.

In practice: many volunteer loosely structured groups/organizations/collectives suffer from participants who talk and communicate a lot, often object a lot as well, but contribute little to the implementation work tasks. Frequently, these type of participants hinder other key participants — on whose work the organization relies on — from getting on with their tasks. Reducing the influence of these talk&communication intensive participants who don’t contribute much to the implementation work is highly positive for the survival, development and quality of work the organization/group/collective produces.

In other words: structured open processes make it possible for an organization/collective/group to not be open and welcoming to any kind of participation internally nor externally, but be selective instead. More of this kind of openness, means more structure, more internalised working discipline, more commitment, and more ability to improve cooperation/collaboration with precision. In a slightly more abstract terms, the more a whole is exposed, defined, and its workings/operations known/visible, the more we can adjust it, reshuffle it, to make it do what participants in the whole want it to do. Open processes enable this, hence open-process in the name. Closed processes allow more corruption of organizational goals: the less we know about the processes, components and their relations, the more individuals can utilise them for own goals and benefits (in academia, careerism).

In Free Software terms, long term freedoms to act and produce collectively do not come cheaply, and have to be defined, developed and defended. The key pre-requisite for the four Free Software freedoms (defined as ethical demands) to cooperate and share is universal free access to software source code. What is missing from the Free Software definition to give us an accurate picture of the collaborative model discussed here, is what is visible from the IETF  principles (see below).

In short, to explain the success of the Internet model, having source code isn’t sufficient. Another key component must be present. And that is developing aimed (goals defined), quality focused, volunteer cooperation in a specific organizational model with the following set of attributes: open participation (anyone can join) and processes, competence, volunteering core, rough consensus and running code decision making principle, defined responsibilities (protocol ownership, in IETF case).

This is precisely why Open Access is not enough to implement a successful open volunteer collaboration on the trail of the Internet software-networking model. One needs a specific organizational model too. And using Open Source paradigm (a movement that is a business friendly and declaratively ethics-free version of Free Software) is even more misleading, because of its emphasis on the source code alone. Open Source is the least useful model/concept of all to help us think this, since it lacks both defined ethics (which is what makes it possible in the first place to define, develop and defend one’s freedoms in Free Software) and a  defined organizational model.  What we need to explain this successful model, is this formula: The Internet Model = Free Software + IETF.  In other words: software + networking. Or even better: ethics + organization. Which is where we arrive to the set of incredibly intriguing political points that ought to be developed here, but i’ll leave that for another text. (small technical note: email subscription to a specific blog category, one  used exclusively for publishing longer in-dept texts, will be offered  to readers who’d like to be informed when the next text in the Hacking The State series gets published on this blog).

To the existing Internet model, i would add the following organizational attributes as highly beneficial: mapped components and relations (stages — recognizable, definable points in collaboration; working groups; their relation, their inter-processes), defined decision making and defined participation and exclusion models. All of this is  geared towards enabling and focusing on the contributions of those who carry out most of the implementation work – such type of work is the blood stream of organization, without its movement, organizations can not produce.

3) Easier project management – because increased task modularity and status (full status of submission = stage + state. see below) real-time visibility (anyone can anytime check the stage&state of any submission on the web system used ) allows for better project management, easier allocation/delegation of tasks, and a more precise sense of progress and problems. Which is all good for the general work spirit, time/resource assessments, and to keep authors who submit papers, and all other parties involved, informed correctly at all times about the stage&state of the submission.

4) Decision making into the hands of the people who matter most - because who does what and how becomes visible, and because those who carry out continuously implementation work matter most for the organization, decision making can be more in their hands.

For example, Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) addresses this by defining a volunteer, and hence defining decision makers, through work contributions: “MIA volunteers are people who have, in the most recent six-month period, made at least three separate contributions over a period of three weeks to six months”.

In the Open Organizations project, we defined this similarly: “Anyone who is doing implementation work in the group, or has done such work in the recent past (e.g. within the past two months), can participate in its decision-making.”

5) Attract new volunteers and reduce impact of the existing counter-productive internal participants – utilizing the above task/process openness and visibility, journal editorial boards could use decision making rules similar to MIA to attract volunteers. Through linking of decision making rights and defined implementation work, it would be recognized that certain type of work that could be done by external participant matters more than mere presence of existing internal talk&communication intensive participants. To reduce risk, only certain decision making rights can be given to new participants to start with, until existing board is not assured they are fit to carry out journal’s long term goals and strategies.

This opens up the organizations for the new participants who would from the beginning adopt the culture (habits) of doing the implementation work and it reduces detrimental influence, and eventually leads to the exclusion of, existing internal talk&communication intensive participants. Which is (exclusion habits and processes) also a positive culture to develop.

Existing software, like the Open Journal System (OJS) could be extended to enable this process to happen. An option for privacy, with reasons stated, could be added to the open-process workflow.

Modular process: stages and states

To summarise, these open process would amount to the following being open: initial draft, editorial collective/individual comments, peer reviews, further peer comments, author comments back to reviewers, all the subsequent drafts, and the final published/rejected text.

One objection is that authors would want only their final version used and quoted, or at to have the least final version clearly recognised and marked as final. A way to both increase the chances of that, and to modularise and define the work in a way to create conditions for the above open processes and their benefits, would be to introduce the concept of submission stage&state, using software web tools at our disposal to implement it. So that it is clear that when a submission comes in (in an openly visible web queue, imagine it like an RSS feed on the side bar of a website), it is at the stage First Draft. As the paper moves through the stages of the publishing process, its full status (stage + state) changes accordingly. This defines our publishing workflow.

First Draft – Editorial Review stage would be a submission with an editorial board review either in process (state = awaiting) or written (status = received); next stage would be First Draft – Peer Review. Awaiting and received states of each stage can be an important functional addition, so that involved parties can be notified when the state of a stage changes. For example, when the editorial board sends the paper for peer reviews, full status could read First Draft – Peer Review (awaiting), when the reviews come back, full status could change to First Draft – Peer Review (received). To clarify:

• A stage is a defined step in the process.

• Each stage can be in one of the pre-defined states.

• Full status is stage+state – it tells us where is the submitted paper in the process and what’s currently going on with it i.e. whose turn is it to act on it.

If the editor in charge of the paper peer reviewing process decides that a new revision is required, status could be changed to Second Draft (awaiting). Changing of the stage and state of the submission could be done with an action as simple as editor changing the drop down menus with available stages and its belonging possible states. Web system would automatically do the required action (Open Journal System does this already within its defined workflow). For example, when editor changes the stage of submission to Second Draft (awaiting) it would send peer reviews received for the first draft and a note to the author (email CC the editor) and perhaps update the RecentChanges web page which would, like on wikis, note each stage and state change of all the papers/submission currently in the process. When a new draft based on incorporation of peer reviews is received (web submission by author), full status automatically changes to Second Draft (received); etc, until we get to the Published, Rejected status – or some more fine grained final outcome full status.

I haven’t used proprietary software for web based journals but i’m quite certain that something like this already exists. However, although existing systems to manage academic publishing process were not designed to enable open collaboration based on a volunteer drive, we can still, and should, learn from them. Picture i presented here is a highly developed system. We don’t need to wait to get to that point.

Existing tools, as simple (or as complex, with thousands of plugins and themes) as this blog and freely available wikis and CMS systems (Drupal) can be customised well enough to enable us to start working using these open-process collaborative practices with a significant degree of labour saving automation now. Many of these web systems that we could start using now to implement a simplified version of this proposal, including various wikis, Wordpress and Drupal, are available to be bought in hosting packages that allow quite amazing levels of fine grained point-and-click installation, backup and administration (in comparison to what was available only few years ago) for less then few hundred pounds/dollars/euros per year (including all the Internet bandwidth that an average journal might need). It is the human element — seeing the potentially positive benefits, seeing them being larger than the risks associated with those changes and the risk of remaining in the current closed mode, changing the habits of editorial boards — that is the biggest obstacle. Finding the right web based technology is far less of a problem.

What if software was developed through closed models?

If the currently existing closed academic publishing process were used instead of the open-process collaboration which has been at core of Free Software and Open Source production, it is very unlikely that we would have ended up with the software that runs this blog, with its 6000+ available plugins which can be installed with a click on the web interface (no technical knowledge needed), nor we would have ended up with open protocols (developed through open collaborative processes with final results open too – see email standards) and networks that enabled standardised networking that we know as the Internet today.

Here’s how a close collaboration could have looked like without Internet Engineering Task Force, Free Software and Open Source production:

• most likely, the Internet in today’s form would not have existed. Instead, we would have had closed, commercial (pay to view), competing networks where the exchange between the networks would have been in many cases impossible, and/or expensive and not affordable to many (i vaguely remember a good text on this possible alternative outcome, but can’t recall it)
• mailing lists as central hubs where work on software, networks and protocols is debated would not exists
• IRC/online chat channels devoted to those projects would not exist
• all communication on patches prior to the patch submissions: problems, improvement, priorities, suggestions, ideas would be strictly between source maintainers and new contributor and not in any way open, visible, to other contributors, nor to public
• comments in the source code (part of the cooperation in engineering and often of the submission process too) would not exist, or be invisible
• there would be no blogs nor news stories commenting on discussions that happen on mailing lists, we would rely on PR from companies
• most likely no blogs, nor wikis would have been invented in the first place, or they would have been a minor, undeveloped software niches
• only the final executable software would be available. perhaps, in some cases, the final source would be available too.

For those who have participated in open software/networking collaboration, and/or those who know how it works: isn’t this closed version quite a depressing picture? And one that would never give us nor the software, nor the Internet as we know it today?

If you haven’t had the privilege of participation in this, and if you have any doubts about how exactly the Internet was built, and what am i referring to, here are the working principles of the The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),

a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The IETF Mission Statement is documented in RFC 3935.

which operates on those principles, worth quoting in full (WG = working group):

• Open process – any interested person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is our commitment to making our documents, our WG mailing lists, our attendance lists, and our meeting minutes publicly available on the Internet.
• Technical competence – the issues on which the IETF produces its documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to technically competent input from any source. Technical competence also means that we expect IETF output to be designed to sound network engineering principles – this is also often referred to as”engineering quality”.
• Volunteer Core – our participants and our leadership are people who come to the IETF because they want to do work that furthers the IETF’s mission of “making the Internet work better”.
• Rough consensus and running code – We make standards based on the combined engineering judgment of our participants and our real-world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.
• Protocol ownership – when the IETF takes ownership of a protocol or function, it accepts the responsibility for all aspects of the protocol, even though some aspects may rarely or never be seen on the Internet. Conversely, when the IETF is not responsible for a protocol or function, it does not attempt to exert control over it, even though it may at times touch or affect the Internet.

If you are an academic, a student, think of the open processes knowledge publishing/production proposals, and of this particular proposal, this way: if the above IETF and free/open software principles had not existed, we would not have had the Internet, nor this blog, nor most tools you use in daily life/work to communicate and cooperate/collaborate. Would you prefer such state of the world? And if you wouldn’t, why not implement similar open processes in academia. If we’re to judge open collaboration models by the results in software and networking protocols, we are missing a lot by staying closed. I’m not blind to political consequences of this proposal, quite the contrary, but discussing it would take too long – i’ll leave that for another post.

Have no doubt, i see (clearly enough to keep working on showing its plausibility) a future of volunteer driven, open process direct-and-participatory democratic state-forms along the lines of this proposal, but that too, is a matter for a different text. Changing closed academic publishing, bringing it where it could be in this age of volunteer driven open processes cooperation, the age of the Internet Model production, is enough for a blog post.

As to the many people who have been saying similar things (in a less structured and developed form, but the spirit of the Internet Model is there) i’m saying here during the last decade, on many mailing lists, blogs, panels, it would be useful to have it listed in one place, to see what kind of negative answers they were given at the time, and to address those objections that — from the standpoint of desire for open-process academic publishing and peer reviewing — make sense (i’ll try to catalog some of it on a wiki page here).

Overall, i have one thing to say to those who share my views on this topic: one of the most important reasons why the IETF and Free Software spread and were successful is because the results were immediately (or soon enough for people to notice and, value it, and join the work) visible and operational (working examples). The same principle can not be applied to theory, at least not in social sciences and humanities, we can’t see theory implemented, working quickly. However, we can make the processes of open cooperation immediately operational and visible. In other words, to make it happen, we can do it ourselves, now. If enough of us do it, and do it well, closed journals, books, cooperation processes, and closed access knowledge (production process and final products) in general, will become history.

A Simple Transition: the Linux kernel development process

The above elaboration is perhaps too complex to be implemented straight away, to be the next step in a move from a closed access journal, to an open process one. Ideally, we need a simple transition model. A model that will require a minimum amount of both additional labour and capital investment at the beginning (most editorial boards are volunteers already stretched to limits), and that will scale, if required, at a later stage. As Benjamin Geer correctly suggested (and wrote in comments almost this entire section – see comments below the text), Linux kernel development process is one such model. It’s well tested as it has been working well for over a decade in software.

Here’s how would such model work: the editor has gathered together a group of scholars who have the time and interest to do peer review; Linus Torvalds, main author of Linux kernel calls them his “lieutenants”.  There’s an open mailing list, and a web site that says: “If you want to publish an article in this journal, you must propose your idea on the mailing list before you write the article.”

People show up on the mailing list and say things like, “I’m thinking of writing an article explaining X, etc., etc.” The lieutenants (and the other subscribers) say, “That won’t work unless you deal with Y somehow. Also, you’ve assumed that X=Q, which is doubtful. Go and read Z and think about it some more.”  Thus they prevent submissions that are based on ignorance, well-known fallacies, etc. And they do this much more quickly than traditional peer review, because they don’t have to read an 8,000-word article to find out that there’s a serious problem: they can find and fix bugs at the design stage rather than the implementation stage. As everyone knows, it’s much cheaper and quicker to fix bugs at the design stage.

After the initial discussion, the authors then go away and produce rough drafts, which can be incomplete, or even just outlines with implementation notes (data to be gathered later, etc.). He post the draft back to the mailing list. Then people on the list say, “OK, that looks better, but you need to make sure you deal with A’s argument, and get data on B, etc.” Thus by the time an author submits an actual article, the editor and the peer reviewers already have a pretty good idea of what’s in it. The author also has a pretty good idea of how receptive the reviewers are to the article, and thus how likely it is to get published. This helps everyone avoid wasting time on submissions that have no chance of being accepted, and yet, most important, the quality control role of the peer reviewing process is maintained.

The lieutenants don’t have to do all the reviewing themselves, because authors comment on each other’s works in progress on the list. It’s in their interest to do so, because the tougher they are on each other, the less likely it is that flawed articles will slip through the process, and the better the journal’s reputation will become, thus making it a more prestigious place to get published. This means less work for the lieutenants. It also means development of a community of peer reviewers whose interest becomes to increase the reputation of a journal in which they publish.

Instead of publishing issues on a regular basis, the journal can publish each article electronically whenever it’s ready. Articles get published when the community consensus is that they’re good enough to publish. At any given time, if there are no finished articles, the journal doesn’t have to publish anything; thus there is no pressure to lower standards or to rush the process in order to meet a deadline.

A print issue can be treated as the “Best of”, or a special/themed issue, containing only a selection of what has been published on-line. This process would make a journal a lively place of activity, with authors being always kept up to date with what is going on with their submissions, and with a possibility for any journal reader to get engaged, on a volunteer basis, through this open process.

Over time, the editor should become more of a coordinator, like Linus, whose role is mainly to establish a general editorial line (e.g. it’s a political journal, and not one on culture, yet papers and issues on culture are welcome if done from angles productive for political debates and issues) and to arbitrate between the lieutenants when they disagree.

All that is needed for this process to start being used is an open mailing lists. For early stage ideas, author can write emails directly to the mailing list – reviews can be done by replies. In a later stage, authors can email Word or Open Office documents, and reviewers can use commenting features, the system everyone is familiar with.

There is a ready available slightly more advanced option, a Wordpress (software running this blog, freely available and incredibly easy to install and use) extension called Commentpress – online commenting of the text written in blog pages where comments appear sideways the to the paragraph being commented on. There are plenty examples on their website, check the The Iraq Study Group Report with comments.  The fanciest cutomised interface for this extension is the one used for the McKenzie Wark’s 2007 Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press) book. Pages are shown like a deck of cards, there are arrows underneath for next/previous navigation, and on the right hand side is the scrolling box with comments.

To make it all simple to start with, all that is needed is an open, archived, easy to backup, mailing list. Other parts of the open process can be improved later. One thing that i discovered lately is how powerful blogging platforms became. For the need of most academic without special figures in their test (maths, physics, chemistry, etc),  blogging software like this Wordpress seems to me miles ahead of Microsoft Word, or Open Office, as a convenient, yest incredibly richly and easily (point and click, no technical knowledge required) extensible working platforms. I say deliberately platform, and not software, nor blog, nor website, because it provides multiple functions in one, and the collection of them together in an easy to use place, provides a result with impact far greater than what would one get from several separate pieces of software that would be required to perform what advanced platforms like Wordpress do. But details of that are also best left for another text.  It is enough to remember that Wordpress would be, in my opinion, a brilliant extension of the mailing list, and is free to setup and point-click to backup and restore.

Open-process peer reviewing and citing early drafts

One of the problems with the process as open as we’re suggesting here is that although authors might like the more extensive peer reviewing that is likely to happen on an open mailing list, it’s likely that most of them would not want to have their work cited, nor used anywhere, before the final version accepted by the journal isn’t ready. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prevent that with technical solutions. Yet, there’s a cultural safeguard parallel from the Linux kernel development that we can reuse.

If a Linux kernel is released with a serious bug, people get annoyed, and the author of the offending code might be publicly embarrassed. But if you post buggy code on the Linux kernel mailing list and someone notices, the worst thing that will happen to you is that you’ll have to fix it. Why? Because everyone knows that it’s not safe to download source code from mailing lists and expect it to work properly. This is a cultural thing: it’s accepted that free-software mailing lists are for hashing out ideas, not for finished work. Everything about them screams ‘Danger: Construction Work’.

Therefore, we think that peer review could be open if it had the right cultural safeguards. There would have to be some principle like ‘respect for peer review’, which meant that citing journal-mailing-list messages and preliminary drafts in academic articles (or newspaper articles!) would be considered a huge taboo. Academic ethics would have to include the idea that you can criticise your opponents’ preliminary drafts as much as you want, but only on the journal-mailing-list. If you want to criticise them anywhere else, you have to wait until the final version is published. In this case, we believe, authors could be made comfortable with proposing  preliminary ideas and subsequent drafts on a mailing list, without having to fear that they will be attacked while in the middle of writing.

Final Words

Finally, there are multiple risks, drawbacks, additional labour investment, transition plans, and other reasonably raised issues to be addressed, in order for this proposal to make sense to editorial boards and editors who will be making decisions whether to accept elements of open-process academic publishing and peer reviewing, or not. I’ll write on those in a separate post. Also, consider this a rough first draft. I’ll keep revising it, probably in its own wiki page on this blog.

As to probable objections that this proposal is a speculation with no empirical side to it: thanks to the good work in social sciences and humanities, it is widely accepted today (widely enough for me) that both empiricism and idealist speculation are both dead concepts. However, not only am I happy to speculate to an extent — based on my subjectively objective reading of reality (which is the position that matters most, since there are no neutral objective positions), which has little in common with an empiricist one — i believe it is necessary to do so. Only practice can confirm our speculations right, or wrong. And even when we do get confirmed to be wrong, i’m perfectly happy to live and die by Beckett’s: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”.

In many ways, my work on open-process collaboration in academia is a “try again” of a project that could be easily seen as quite a failed one – Open Organizations. I don’t care about those assessments either. I’m happy to keep trying, and keep failing, if necessary. The worst possible scenario, and the only one i fear, is to not try. Failure is fine. Especially when performed in open.

This is an early version of the text. Latest version of this text is here.