Incorporate references that connects open culture and "virtue"

[patcon]

There are some real gems in the literature of Commons-based Peer Production, which is the academic term used to describe the sort of open work that is perhaps most readily studied in free software movements. I can't recommend highly enough that people dig into this literature.

For now, I'll just share one of my favourites, and perhaps I'll share some choice quotes when I have time to review :)

• Quick explainer video of "Commons-Based Peer Production"
• tl;dr of Elinor Ostram's Nobel prize-winning life work on how people manage physical commonses
• Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue re: digital commonses. (Yochai Benkler & Helen Nissenbaum)

[patcon]

Re: Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue paper

Not the section on "Public Policy"

A practical corollary of the observation that social and institutional arrangements have the power to shape human behavior and disposition, is to strive for positively valued behaviors and dispositions through purposive interventions in these arrangements. This ambition is not unprecedented either in the actions of political leaders or in evaluations of leaders, policies and institutions by members of the academy. [...] According to Sandel, such arguments would not have been out of place for the environment in which there was general agreement regarding the principle that: “The public life of a republic must serve a formative role, aimed at cultivating citizens of a certain kind.” The government was seen to have “a stake in cultivating citizens of a certain kind.”

[patcon]

A great quote within the paper itself:

All around us today are artifacts that were generated in the technological dramas of their time: railways, canals, aviation artifacts, radios, and more. And yet their meaning, together with their location in what was formerly a deeply felt grammar of political action, is utterly lost; in their place is what appears to be nothing more than a material record of “technological progress.” What was once the conscious product of human cultural and political action, passionate and meaningful, is now a silent material reality within which we lead our daily lives, mutely acting out patterns of behavior that once had obvious connections to the root paradigms of our culture[...]. To become fully aware of the political circumstances of their lives, new generations of students, at every level of education, must be trained (as Hughes suggests) to ‘fathom the depth of the technological society, to identify currents running more deeply than those conventionally associated with politics and economics.’

[patcon]

When a society endorses social policies that, for example, offer protection to whistle-blowers, provide tax-credits for charitable donations, or generate institutional safeguards against corruption, it is not shrinking the moral sphere, but structuring the environment to lessen the burden of valued practices. In a similar way, commons-based peer production opens a path previously restricted (by economic cost and industrial organization) to small numbers of professional producers of information, knowledge and culture to large numbers of ordinary people, enabling them to contribute to the public good in a particular domain. The path does not bypass virtuous action, but generates new opportunities for it.

[gcharest]

Thanks for sharing, lots of very deep material there!

[gcharest]

Hi @patcon , we'll keep these references in mind but will now close this issue.

Thanks!