Talk Is Silver, Code Is Gold? Beyond Traditional Notions of Contribution in Peer Production: The Case of Drupal

David Rozas,Nigel Gilbert,Paul Hodkinson,Samer Hassan

doi:10.3389/fhumd.2021.618207

Abstract

Peer production communities are based on the collaboration of communities of people, mediated by the Internet, typically to create digital commons, as in Wikipedia or free software. The contribution activities around the creation of such commons (e.g., source code, articles, or documentation) have been widely explored. However, other types of contribution whose focus is directed toward the community have remained significantly less visible (e.g., the organization of events or mentoring). This work challenges the notion of contribution in peer production through an in-depth qualitative study of a prominent “code-centric” example: the case of the free software project Drupal. Involving the collaboration of more than a million participants, the Drupal project supports nearly 2% of websites worldwide. This research (1) offers empirical evidence of the perception of “community-oriented” activities as contributions, and (2) analyzes their lack of visibility in the digital platforms of collaboration. Therefore, through the exploration of a complex and “code-centric” case, this study aims to broaden our understanding of the notion of contribution in peer production communities, incorporating new kinds of contributions customarily left invisible.

Highlights

What is value? Aristotle’s writings (Brown, 2009) on value as, in essence, an exchange of two things; Adam Smith’s dichotomy of value in use and value in exchange (Robertson and Taylor, 1957); and the identification by Marx and Engels (1990) of concrete and abstract forms of labor associated to those; are just a few examples of the myriad of conceptualizations historically discussed around the concept of value.In this article, we explore perceptions of value in the context of the collaborative economy, in which forms of value are increasingly created by crowds and communities of diverse participants
We develop from Graeber’s (2001) perspective of value as a coordination mechanism, which in the case of CommonsBased Peer Production (CBPP) is contextualized as the actions which emerge as part of meaningful contribution activities to the participants of such communities and, to a certain extent in some cases, find a reflection in the artifacts that these communities employ to collaborate
We investigate notions of contribution in CBPP, posing the question: what types of activities are perceived and valued as contributions in Commons-Based Peer Production and how are they recorded in the tools employed for coordination?

Summary

Introduction

What is value? Aristotle’s writings (Brown, 2009) on value as, in essence, an exchange of two things; Adam Smith’s dichotomy of value in use and value in exchange (Robertson and Taylor, 1957); and the identification by Marx and Engels (1990) of concrete and abstract forms of labor associated to those; are just a few examples of the myriad of conceptualizations historically discussed around the concept of value.In this article, we explore perceptions of value in the context of the collaborative economy, in which forms of value are increasingly created by crowds and communities of diverse participants. The growth of the collaborative economy has encompassed an increasing lack of common ways to assess, control and measure these forms of value (Arvidsson and Peitersen, 2013) These changes can be understood in the wider context of the Information Economy, in which, as a result of changes in technological conditions, information has become a fundamental source of productivity and power (Castells, 2011). Research carried out drawing on crowdsourcing techniques (Fuster-Morell et al, 2016a) found examples of the broad diversity of areas in which collaborative work on the commons is present. This includes citizen science, urban commons, peer funding and open design

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