IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 54

independence for the employees, and hedonism
(through gaining wealth) for employers. Thus, the services and platfor ms assisting crowd labor are
designed in a way that supports values held separately by employers and employees. However, such design
does not promote behaviors that would realize
a ny collective values, such as that of universalism
or benevolence.
Moreover, the architecture might be constructed
to give a false impression of freedom (in choosing
one's contribution) and equality (all can contribute).
In reality the owner secures disproportional gains
and fully controls the architecture of the system
(design and policies), limiting the actions that are
available to contributors. This practice may not only
inhibit some values and prevent the community from
maturing but may also lead to exploitation of the value-based motivations as well as to violation of contributor's values.

The architecture might be constructed
to give a false impression of freedom
and equality.

As an example, let us consider the inequalities in
access to knowledge about the project's goal in crowd
labor applications. Contributors receive and fulfil a single task that is just a small part of the whole. For example, hundreds of interpreters might receive short
recorded dialogs for translation. For each of them separately this can be seen as a profitable, fast job which
does not raise any concerns. But if they were informed
that others have received similar dialogs of which summation would result in years of recorded conversations
of hundreds of people, those who value privacy could
be greatly disturbed. While knowledge of the complete
picture might not alter any given participant's choice to
participate, having all the information would enable
them to weigh different personal values and then make
an informed decision.
Therefore the limitations that come with this type of
peer production are the suppression of some values
that might be important to participants. However, the
more daunting risk comes from the fact that inequalities in control over the architecture and regulations of
the platform may result in direct violation of the values
held by the participants and in exploitation of their value-based motivations.

Collective Agency
We argue that this risk is alleviated in such communities as Wikipedia or FLOSS projects because these
commons-based peer production efforts - thanks in
part to their design - gain a quality of collective agency. They become more than a sum of the parts (i.e., of
individual efforts) - they become a unit at a higher
level of description that has its own goals and values
and has an introspective awareness of its own
proceedings [18].
This concept can be better understood when one
adopts the perspective of complex systems. There, it
has been widely recognized that individual actions and
interactions can generate coherent patterns on the
macro scale (i.e., self-organization) in an emergent fashion. Sometimes this self-organization is not only visible
in temporal relations between the behavior of elements
(i.e., patterns) but also in the appearance of some macro-scale qualities: group identity, culture, norms, or values. In this perspective, values are an (emergent) effect
of interactions between individuals. Moreover, as a
macro-level property they influence the behavior of the
system's constituent elements - they limit or enable
individual behaviors in a process of second order emergence (i.e., immergence) [19].
Changing by design the architectures that underlie
the interactions of individuals may lead to planned emergence [20]. It may be also employed in a very conscious
immergence. For example, if a community is transparent
with its governance and aims, it may become - collectively and individually - aware of its emergent properties (e.g., norms). It might further gain a collective
awareness of the processes and mechanisms that led to
their appearance. In such a case - again, collectively -
it may engage in a planned process of changing those
emergent properties through changing its procedures
and governance. If a community, set to be open and
non-restrictive to promote creativity, realizes that its procedures have become too complex and stifle it instead,
it might change those procedures (i.e., micro-level interactions) through changing the policies (laws) or architectures (code). The emergent collective awareness is
necessary to reverse-engineer the process that led to
such unsolicited results and to shape it in a new way so
that it fulfils the collectively set goals. Such introspective
self-design is a marvelous example of the way in which
human collectives display much more complexity than
other natural complex systems.
This type of self-governance is a way to attain collective agency and collective self-direction. Agency is a
basic human need that has been thoroughly researched
on the individual level [21], but not so thoroughly at
the group level. Whenever agency is considered as a
group property, it is mostly described in terms of the

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SEPTEMBER 2017

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