When the Power of Technology Goes to the People: Digital CBPP in a Crisis

• In Event: Social Movements, Technology, and Political Participation

Abstract

On February 6, 2023, Southeast Turkey and Syria experienced devastating earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.5, resulting in the loss of at least 58,000 lives. On the same day, an ad hoc collective action emerged, led by a voluntary group named the Open Software Network (OSN), with the aim of utilizing open-source data and other digital tools for disaster management. This ad hoc network rapidly mobilized 22,000 volunteers with high IT skills worldwide in a day. They collaborated on creating essential applications and websites to locate individuals amidst the wreckage and disseminate verified information. Within two days, the applications they created received 100 thousand clicks, and the applications and data they provided were open for use by both professional rescue teams on the field and ordinary citizens seeking help for themselves or other earthquake survivors. Despite not actively working on a project, their communication channels remain active, and the code they produced is freely available on GitHub. This mass-scale and agile collective action occurred against a backdrop of escalating challenges vis-à-vis formal political institutions and their capacity to handle large-scale human crises. The era of multiple crises is straining governments globally, often rendering them ineffective in crisis response while in the case of Turkey, rising distrust in public institutions in the face of an autocratic government manifested in the government’s inefficiency in reaching out to earthquake survivors through rescue operations and later through relief efforts.
Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking work challenged the prevailing notion of the "tragedy of the commons" by highlighting instances where communities collaboratively manage common-pool resources (CPRs) sustainably (Ostrom 1990). With the advent of the internet, scholars, including Ostrom herself, extended this framework to encompass non-tangible CPRs such as information, books, the internet, and digital technologies, labeling them under the umbrella term knowledge commons (Hess and Ostrom 2007). Digital commons, on the other hand, constitute a special type of knowledge commons because they have the potential to solve the scalability problem of traditional commons and reduce transaction costs dramatically. Research elaborating on digital commons is stamped by Yochai Benkler’s work, which coins the term commons-based peer production (CBPP) (Benkler, 2004). Benkler argues that the volunteer work put into digital collaboration projects such as Wikipedia constitutes a non-market alternative to economic production because they are not conducted with an expectation of financial returns. Although there are studies on commons governance as briefly discussed above, they are not able to explain the example of the OSN, which was ad hoc, non-institutionalized, large-scale, and very effective in producing commons. My research will fill this gap by analyzing the governance mechanisms of OSN; and investigating a potential relationship between the global trend of increasing disapproval rates of institutional political participation, individuals’ perception of technology expertise and experience of volunteering in commons-based peer production.
This study addresses the research question, 'How do individuals’ perceptions of institutional political participation and self-assessed technology competence impact their experience of digital commons-based peer production?” I adopt an exploratory mixed-methods approach to the research. The study is initiated by the interviews with the OSN volunteers and other civil society members who are experts in use of technology in Turkish civil society. Secondly, a survey will be conducted with the OSN volunteers on their experiences of digital commons-based peer production. Finally, the findings will be discussed with key interviewees in a focus group discussion. The findings of this research will contribute to the understanding on the digital commons-based peer production as a non-market alternative to public goods and services provision in crisis settings and establish the influence of technology use in the action forms civil society can take.

Author

• ilayda ece ece ova, Syracuse University