Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance

The future for platform holders is cooperation, not just competition | Opinion

When an industry changes -- even quite radically -- it can be hard to pinpoint the moment that the shift began. There a…

Platform Economies

The world feels split into three buckets:

Designing a multi-sided data platform: findings from the International Data Spaces case

The paper presents the findings from a 3-year single-case study conducted in connection with the International Data Spaces (IDS) initiative. The IDS represents a multi-sided platform (MSP) for secure and trusted data exchange, which is governed by an institutionalized alliance of different stakeholder organizations. The paper delivers insights gained during the early stages of the platform’s lifecycle (i.e. the platform design process). More specifically, it provides answers to three research questions, namely how alliance-driven MSPs come into existence and evolve, how different stakeholder groups use certain governance mechanisms during the platform design process, and how this process is influenced by regulatory instruments. By contrasting the case of an alliance-driven MSP with the more common approach of the keystone-driven MSP, the results of the case study suggest that different evolutionary paths can be pursued during the early stages of an MSP’s lifecycle. Furthermore, the IDS initiative considers trust and data sovereignty more relevant regulatory instruments compared to pricing, for example. Finally, the study advances the body of scientific knowledge with regard to data being a boundary resource on MSPs.

The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity

This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally “contingent,” that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback.

Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure

Platforms can bring challenging and divisive policy issues to a new kind of democratic process, enabling a ‘people’s mandate’ for their policies and helping mitigate corporate and partisan power.

NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement | Net Mundial

Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance

Institute of Network Cultures | Ben Grosser: Planning the Exodus from Platform Realism

Thinking about the current state of platforms, I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s articulation of capitalist realism, the idea that we don’t imagine or build alternatives to capitalism because we can no longer envision a world without it. Big tech, in a few short years, has managed to instill within the public a similar state of platform realism. So many are unable to imagine how global communication, media, search, etc. could ever function without the platforms. Despite a growing malaise, it’s become difficult for many to consider a world without big tech platforms as a viable conception of the future.

The politics of ‘platforms’ - Tarleton Gillespie, 2010

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what ...

Your platform is not an ecosystem

Another day, another exhortation to join an “ecosystem” that’s anything but. I could pick a hundred examples, but one that recently caught my eye was an ad placed in the Financial Times by the Singapore stock exchange, SGX Group, promising “multiple growth avenues, one trusted ecosystem”. SGX wants companies to list on its exchange rather than, say, the Hong Kong one which has more or less the same exclusive offer. SGX promises “access (to) Asia through our trusted ecosystem anchored in Singapore.” Ecosystems can be a lot of things. ‘Trusted’, by which they mean centrally policed to achieve defined, lower-risk outcomes, is not one of them. Calling built environments ‘ecosystems’ is common everywhere from financial services to supply chains to – quite a stretch, here – a retirement living complex. But it’s most often used in the tech world to describe the relations between software, services and hardware typically owned by a single company. For example, it’s how Google describes everything that hangs off the Android operating system. These kinds of proprietary and deterministic architectures are called ecosystems so often that we’ve stopped noticing. And that’s kind of the point. We need to start seeing this metaphor again, and what it’s hiding in plain sight. But first, a reminder of what an ecosystem actually is.

Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies

This paper considers the intersection of governance and attention in digital contexts. In particular, it argues for the relevance of ‘attention economies’, or the analysis of human attention as a resource, to ‘governance surfaces’, or the means available for organisational adaptation and action. Existing theoretical frameworks for the governance of community-managed resources lack adequate consideration for how people’s attention is engaged and directed. To address this gap, this paper proposes heuristics that assess how attention relates to governance in online organisations. The heuristics are informed by literature on attention economies and governance, as well as three case studies that consider recent attempts to address attention in the design of governance surfaces in blockchain-based systems. The resulting heuristics serve as analytical and normative tools to enable researchers and system designers to better understand attention in a governance system. They invite consideration of whether the structure of attention in a system is appropriate, efficient, and just.

CNCF Platforms White Paper

This paper intends to support enterprise leaders, enterprise architects and platform team leaders to advocate for, investigate and plan internal platforms for cloud computing. We believe platforms significantly impact enterprises' actual value streams, but only indirectly, so leadership consensus and support is vital to the long-term sustainability and success of platform teams. In this paper we'll enable that support by discussing what the value of platforms is, how to measure it, and how to implement platform teams that maximize it.

Platformonomics - Dining Preferences of the Cloud and Open Source: Who Eats Who?

TL;DR: If the cloud didn’t eat Hadoop Inc., Pivotal and Red Hat, what explains their diminished prospects? Marc Andresseesssen’s “software is eating the world” has given rise to an entire technolog…

Symposium: A Skeptical View of Information Fiduciaries

In recent years, the concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on platform regulation. In a forthcoming essay, we question the wisdom of applying a fiduciary framework to dominant digital platforms.

Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities

Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.