Nondominium, Quality guarantees and Economic Incentives of the community.

[xekoukou]

It appears to me that there is a fundamental difference in the incentives of the community when it comes to free hardware manufacturing as opposed to free software.

Under free software development, there is an incentive to allow as many people to participate in the software development since each contribution's value is shared among all the participants as the result, the software is part of the commons.

That doesn't mean though that everyone can participate in the software development. Contributions and people are judged based on the quality of their work and that plays an important role in allowing that work to be pushed to the repository of the project.

Thus, when it comes to software development, the community has the correct economic incentives to both promote peer production and at the same time guarantee the quality of the software.

Free hardware manufacturing on the other hand is another thing. Here, the value of each contribution is the sum of money that each participant gets,it is individualistic, thus there is an incentive for the community of participants to reject new people on a basis other than quality of their contributions.

Thus, the community itself cannot play the role of guaranteeing the quality of production.

Given that the quality of production process/product is important, we need to find other ways to guarantee it.

One solution is the introduction of formal rules that the community/custodian needs to follow. The question then is, who makes the rules. Since they might need to be dynamic depending on changes in the production process, how are they updated?

Certainly, the rules need to be set in cooperation with other members of the open value network community that do not participate in that specific production because they would not have alternate motives.
Thus, it is imperative that the custodians/different communities form a network whose consensus determines the way each custodian practices the Nondominium agreement.

Have in mind that investors will also have to participate in determining the rules, because the risk of investment depends on the quality of the product and the production process. On the other hand, investors might not care about peer production/Nondominium.