Social Norms and Rules in Peer Production
Christian Pentzold · 2020
The regulation of peer production projects is usually achieved by the users themselves. Ideally, this self-organization and self-management depend on shared social norms and rules. This chapter provides an overview and comparison of peer production's institutions, traces their origins, and describes their implications for cooperation and governance. It charts and discusses rules and norms as potentially conducive "forms of closure" in peer production. The chapter asks why peer production needs any sort of rules and norms. Based on this discussion of institutional conditions, it maps what sorts of rules and norms prevail in peer production. The chapter delineates the three institutional levels of policies, guidelines, and basic normative understandings that are geared towards the products and the processes of peer production. Next, it examines how rules and norms come into existence and are made to function. Finally, the chapter reflects to what end peer production's institutions congeal into governance regimes, bureaucracy, and hierarchies.