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This chapter shows how competition among groups shapes moral markets. It explains how the Circuit Riders engaged with the new dominant actor in nonprofit technology assistance, NPower. Through successive interactions, new conventions of coordination reduced the uncertainty of interacting in the nonprofit technology assistance market. In response to NPower’s growing dominance, some in the Circuit Rider movement mobilized around an alternative platform, free/open source software. The strategy was an attempt to reassert the founding values of the Circuit Rider movement as articulated in technology. Ultimately, the Circuit Riders had limited success in splitting the technology services market. This chapter illustrates how, once institutionalized, organizational forms and practices like social enterprise are difficult to challenge, but also how social movements can create alternative niches for consumers who share their social values. Because markets are not organized strictly on principles of economic rationality, such pressure can nudge them in socially desirable directions.

How can the next generation of digital products and servces best serve individuals with disabilities in the Global South? Local advocates, content, and tool developers can leverage global digital initiatives in education, employment, data, and standards to improve inclusion for people with disabilities in the connected digital age. To succeed, products and services must be inclusive, sustainable, and locally relevant. This chapter explores examples of programs that deeply engage people with disabilities in the Global South as developers, employees, and/or individual users; utilize open, global standards; increase collaboration to raise the voices of people with disabilities; and consider new challenges brought about by technology as it rapidly evolves.

In chapter 3, Roh shifts focus to distribution networks and how they facilitate dialogic activity on intratextual and intertextual scales. The advent of decentralized networks complicates the regulating effect law has on dialogic activity. Strongly centralized distribution channels throttle the dissemination of unsanctioned works. Digital networks widen output and loosen control and for this reason have come under regulation to simulate existing paradigms of control. More than a simple technological innovation, distributed communications networks reflect a discernible cultural shift in alignment with postmodernity. Using the XDA Developers open source software community as a model, Roh evaluates how their carefully curated environment employs a decentralized structure—a form without center—and analyzes the resulting dialogic operability. That is, Roh argues that the online network environment best reflects the cultural and architectural roots of nonhierarchical dialogue conducive to rapid, iterative cultural, and textual evolution. With a historical and theoretical survey of decentralized networks, Roh shows how the mechanics of nonhierarchical textual exchange operate online and how that may benefit literary development.

In this dialogue, Tim O’Reilly begins by explaining why change is natural and good and how we have to be open to the future. Later he discusses how the logic that makes things work is related to science and not to a particular set of beliefs; to understanding what is efficient and why within this logic there is a hierarchy that is made up of a set of values. He goes on to explain how the Web 2.0 applications he formulated— for example, the social networks—use network effects by harnessing collective intelligence in such a way that the more people there are who use them, the better they become. After this, he describes how his analysis of the paradigm shift in open code is equivalent to that expressed by Thomas Kuhn in his work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. Later on, O’Reilly reflects on the different possible kinds of Internet of the future before moving on to explain why the most innovative people go beyond the limits of “canonical knowledge” in their daily practice, and the way in which their artistic transgressions or discoveries make them part of the new canon.

This chapter explores how intentional communities strive for interdependence or regional self-sufficiency in areas such as transportation, building, and food. These communities link themselves to individuals and communities in broader networks of interdependence, sharing goods, information, and expertise. They run demonstrations and workshops—open source education—to pass on skills that contribute towards self-sufficiency and negotiate legal obstacles such as building codes. These communities experiment in areas including: natural building, sustainable agriculture, alternate currencies and time banks, and alternate energy such as bio-fuel. Communities that identify as feminist still must address tensions that arise when women enter male-dominated areas such as building.

The conclusion reiterates the problems with analyzing this new constellation of power and of predicting its outcomes. Certain effective provisions are highlighted such as Section 3d of India’s new Patents Act which maintains rigorous standards of inventiveness and efficacy, preventing the “evergreening” of patents and “me too” drugs that have been awarded patents elsewhere. The study ends with a brief comparison to similar patent struggles in Brazil and an assessment of programs that offer more equitable approaches to innovation and ownership such as the Health Impact Fund and the Open Source Drug Discovery program.

In this chapter, the author gives an overview of hacker ethics and associates these with cybertheology through tracing their development and using the works of those who have written on hacker ethics, such as Levy, Raymond, Pitman and Himanen. He notes that Himanen suggests the Sundayization of Friday – overturning the protestant work ethic that Weber had suggested. The hacker sees work as a joy, something playful, yet s/he is never idle. Spadaro uses Wikipedia as an example of what this type of ethic can produce – something that would have been impossible without a great deal of effort and cost, had the world’s experts not built this online encyclopaedia voluntarily. While exulting in the possibilities that such collective works offer, he uses Pierre Lévy’s warnings on the dangers of prevarication and collective stupidity, exploitation and control, as a means of bringing us back to earth. He then outlines two models which have been offered: Raymond’s model of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Himanen’s model of the Monastery. While he notes that there are problems with both models, Spadaro asks if open source theology can offer us anything. In Christian terms, he says, Revelation is the open source of theology, but through this open source attitude we may risk what McLaren has called an imperial form, which may become a participative narration that may lead to groups and individuals who have frames and contexts that are culturally disparate being left out. Will such problematics not lead to clashes within the Catholic Church? The narrative then moves on to the concept of the gift, which he associates with Peer to Peer (p2p) sharing. In this p2p logic, the concept of the neighbor is also changed. We do not know to whom it is that we give this gift. As in blood donation, those receiving the donation are unknown to us. This is not horizontal exchange but opens us to the notion of a deductible and inexhaustible grace, this has passed through traditions, hierarchical, sacramental and historical mediation. Were we to stop at this juncture, there would be a radical incompatibility between theology’s logic and the Web’s. The author attempts to explain this through use of the concepts of the ‘freebie’ and the ‘freemium’. Grace does not respond to the logic of profit, nor can ecclesiology be reduced to ecclesial sociology. Spadaro returns to discussing how hacker ethics can assist in argument around the ecclesial surplus that is the Church, and in assisting our search for the transcendent.

Chapter 3, “The Rebirth of the Author,” turns to how novel bioengineered organisms mirror synthetic biologists’ arguments about how such creatures should be exchanged. It shows that ideas about genetic exchanges within biotic systems underwrite the ways biologists think about economic exchange, in particular how analogies of life to either text or machines shape the way synthetic biologists think about and act upon intellectual property decisions ranging from patenting, copyright, Open Source, and copyleft to credit, attribution, and publishing. Not only shaping epistemological definitions (of what life is) or normative claims (about what it should be), these analogies impact the way bioengineering gets done and the legal and economic regimes that are installed in and around it.

The smart devices that make up the Internet of Things induce consumers to cede control over the products they buy. Devices like smartphones offer real benefits, but combined with embedded software, network connectivity, microscopic sensors and large-scale data analytics, they pose serious threats to ownership and consumer welfare. From coffee makers and toys to cars and medical devices, the products we buy are defined by software. That code gives device makers an increasing degree of control over how, when, and whether those products can be used even after consumers buy them. That shift of control has profound implications for ownership.

This chapter focuses on peer-production as a form of collaborative digital work, closely allied to crowdsourcing and other contemporary working practices that are mediated by digital platforms. Such platforms are a growing form of digital work; however, they raise complex methodological issues. First, although often a single collaborative platform coordinates groups, work can be distributed globally. Second, multimodal approaches require the researcher to transition between online and offline media. Finally, it can be challenging to identify what is ‘work’ as activity boundaries are blurred. It is argued that the use of Activity Theory overcomes some of these issues and its utility in an analysis of the production of the open source software, Drupal, is demonstrated, highlighting the potential for Activity Theory to enable cross-contextual comparisons and proposing the concept of ‘socio-technical systems of contribution’ as a way to understand interactions between networks of collaboration. The limitations of the approach and potential future developments are noted.