thesis

66 Secrecy vs. Openness
projects have thus created governance mechanisms to ensure that contributions are
included completely, and in a timely fashion. The instruments of voice, exit and
fork, the usage of which are free to anyone, create substantial incentives on the
building actor to refrain from discriminating among contributors. Secrecy of the
production platform and the products reduces public popularity and exposure of
these communities, which also reduces a defector’s ability to raise voice outside of
the community and the general public.
2.3.4 Adapting peer production for security?
The previous subsection discussed various ways in which secrecy could impact upon
defining characteristics of peer production in theory. What will happen in practice
depends on actors’ choices and their evaluation of the respective costs and
benefits of secrecy and openness. If secrecy would affect all the elements of openness
in the collaborative production process, it would look substantially different
from the familiar FLOSS or Wikipedia communities. However, there might be
ways to negotiate the tension between secrecy and peer production. Possible solutions
could address any of the detrimental effects of introducing secrecy into a peer
production and also address the underlying causations. The goal here is neither to
build scenarios for all possible impacts of secrecy upon the entire collaborative production
process nor to develop theoretical ways to mitigate the impact of secrecy.
The remainder of this subsection seeks to showcase the fact that that adding elements
of secrecy does not necessarily establish a production systems that is entirely
different from peer production, and that, despite some limitations to openness,
some characteristics could remain.
With accessibility restrictions to the production platform in place, the number of
potential contributors is limited, but not as inevitably as it appears to be at first
sight. Even if access is restricted, a layered approach or a modified onion model
could still grant open access to a limited set of information at the basic level. However,
any potential contributor would have to meet certain characteristics to be
granted access to informational repositories. There are two aspects regarding why
closure still has potentially detrimental effects. First, as mentioned earlier, any vetting
or application procedure might deter potential contributors, and there is no
way to avoid this but by lowering the entrance bar and making it seamless. This
could either happen by some kind of automation or, probably more realistically, by
introducing several layers of access. The second aspect, however, is impossible to
avoid. Restricting access precludes the definition of characteristics by which the
potential contributor is judged. This ex-ante closure impedes potentially valuable
contributions by actors who do not live up to the norms defined in advance. A