Peer2Politics

In this paper we look at how information in societies is organized and how power relationships arise as a consequence of this organization. We argue that many of the observed information asymmetries are not happenstance and, drawing from a wealth of scholarship from the economics and finance literature, we posit that outcomes are inevitably detrimental. The paper concentrates on the techniques that foster information imbalances, such as media and propaganda, knowledge production, educational systems, legal and organizational structures, exclusive information networks, and surveillance. We conclude that in the absence of greater transparency, the deleterious effects of unequal access to information will continue and deepen.

"Justin believes open development is crucially important for long-term success and notes that two ‘flavours’ of open source are emerging. He says: ‘We are seeing a difference between open source and open development. So what we are seeing is some projects and entities who are saying here is the source code, it is under Apache licence or GPL or whatever but the decisions about how the code got to that state are behind some wall—it is not in public’. This means that a developer has all the requisite rights to edit, modify and redistribute the code, but doesn’t have any real understanding as to how or why the code developed that way in the first place. Justin says: ‘So you run into some bug and you are saying why is the code this way? There is no historical context or archiving or rationale…So, [with the open development method] what we are seeing is, that in addition to “here is the code” we are seeing “here are all the decisions being made in public”.’