Value Sensitive Design for Peer Production Systems: Mediating Social Interactions
Agnieszka Rychwalska, Magdalena Roszczyńska-Kurasińska · IEEE Technology and Society Magazine · 2017
Advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) have fueled the rise of the peer production community, a type of socio-technical system that self-organizes to deliver products or services created in a distributed manner. These novel modes of production, examples of which include such successful projects as Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, or Project Gutenberg, defy the expectations of standard organizations - they open rather than enclose knowledge and they motivate contribution through social rather than monetary incentives. Optimists reveling in these new possibilities for collaboration forecast that peer production will take over standard companies and reduce existing inequalities thanks to its ability to unleash the innovative potential of individuals and social groups in an unprecedented manner. Yet, what is called "peer production" often entails a variety of social structures and activities that do not have much in common. Some of these - crowd labor for example - have little potential to change the existing patterns of hierarchical, closed organizations. We argue here that what distinguishes those peer production systems that have the potential to revolutionize economies from other ICT mediated collaborations are the values that such systems embody, pursue, and promote (such as openness, equality, or freedom).