IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 51

project, a messenger app, a multiplayer game, or a
complex content management system - determine
what is possible and what is not possible just as surely
as the architecture of physical spaces determines what
behaviors are likely to manifest. Over these boundary
conditions the other regulatory mechanisms - social
norms or explicitly codified rules, sometimes also market mechanisms - may further limit possible behaviors and actions [10].

An Exemplar: Wikipedia
Designing peer production communities to preserve
and promote specific values requires making certain
implementation choices - both in the software (code
regulation), as well as in operational settings within it
(similar to law regulation). Such choices are not meant
to guarantee any value to be present, but to prevent
making desirable values impossible to pursue in certain environments. Virtues can be instilled into community members through proper exposition in their
social environment (including peer production communities), and they can then be generalized to other contexts [11]. Therefore, it is important to build platforms
for peer production in such a way as not to inhibit
desirable values. We will present some examples
based on a peer production community that so far has
been successful.
Even though it has its maladies [12]-[14], Wikipedia is
still the prime example of ICT enabled peer production.
We argue that this is in part due to the values from
Schwartz's theory that we have identified as promoted
by Wikipedia's architecture: universalism, achievement,
social power, self-direction, hedonism but also conformity and security. This wide scope of values present
makes Wikipedia inviting for many varied individuals
with different backgrounds and competencies, and provides an overall community balance in terms of its
value composition.
The most prominent implementation choice in Wikipedia - indeed, its motto and one of its defining features - is that it is an "Encyclopedia that anyone can
edit" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). That
is, any person, any visitor, any user - can see and click
on the edit button visible on any encyclopedic content
page. (There are restrictions for editing policy as well as
for creating new articles, but for the purposes of the
point made here these restrictions are negligible.) This
approach promotes openness and equality - values
from the "universalism" motivational domain [3].
Universalism is also present in the idea, shared by
many Wikipedia contributors [12], that the project is
creating something grandiose for the benefit of all
humanity: creating the greatest collection of human
knowledge, free and accessible to anyone without
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restrictions. This may sound trivial, but the fact that the
platform does not require registration, identification, or
providing any personal data or any payment to use,
grants some unprecedented access to knowledge, to
any person with an Internet connection. Moreover, the
choice to license content with Creative Commons
licenses (typically Attribution, Share Alike, and Public
Domain - detailed descriptions of these licenses are
available at: https://creativecommons.org/share-yourwork/licensing-types-examples/) further removes the
barriers between the community of contributors and
the users who merely appropriate existing content. This
solution promotes the values of openness and equality
and, for those editors who strongly identify with the
grand vision of Wikipedia as an open resource for all,
fulfills their need to care for the welfare of other people
(another universalism value).

Designing peer production
communities to preserve and promote
specific values requires making
certain implementation choices -
both in the software and in
operational settings.

The Wikipedia motto promotes other values as well,
although less explicitly. To begin with, Wikipedia's specific embodiment of openness promotes achievement
values. On Wikipedia, anyone can contribute, regardless
of their qualifications. A full professor from a renowned
academic institution has the same powers as any other
person, even in the area of her excellence. For her contributions to remain incorporated into an article in a
case of conflicting opinions, she has to defend them just
as any other user does and her academic degree does
not carry much weight. What is more important is her
past history as an editor and her previous behavior
(politeness, sound argumentation, cool-headedness,
etc.) in similar situations. Just as Schwartz has defined
it, users strive to achieve "personal success through
demonstrating competence according to social standards" in order to become "successful, capable [and]
influential" [7, p. 239]. Collecting various socially
acknowledged achievements is possible through implementation of various metrics: edit count, tenure, and
barnstars (awards from other members of the

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https://www.creativecommons.org/share-your https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

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