The term “commons” refers to a social system in which a group of users shares resources. By cooperating, people can create communities that are more compassionate, moral, and environmentally conscious. GitHub is an online hosting service for software development and version control using Git, it offers social network-like features to help developers manage their repository versions and branches. Users can discuss, manage repositories, contribute to other people’s repositories, browse and download public repositories, and view code changes, also including “private repositories with limitless collaborators.”
I will explain from 2 aspects that GitHub can be seen as a common-based media.
Convergence and Cooperative
According to economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, we are the “cooperative species”, Rachel Botsman also stated ‘the convergence of social networks that allow trust between strangers and have a greater accessibility, as well as critical environmental issues and cost consciousness’.
GitHub is a great platform for collaboration, where each member can work on the master’s branch at the same time, without stepping on each other’s toes. Goals are divided into components or modules, each of which can be developed independently, allowing participants to work asynchronously without having to wait for each other’s contributions or directly coordinate with each other.
Peer production also enables people to self-assign projects that match their interests, expertise, and talents. For instance, if you want to produce a Sudoku board-solving programme, on the platform, there are numerous possibilities for solutions and ideas. You can also connect with others there to exchange ideas when you run into issues, and have a better understanding of the code you will be producing in the future by consulting the code that others have already contributed.
GitHub offers advantages, particularly for large group collaborations. It is typically challenging to coordinate and allocate tasks. However, in this case, the massive variability in human and information resources has no impact on efficiency; rather, it increases the return on the scale in terms of the number of people, resources, and projects, which can be completed without the need for contracts or other mechanisms that enable projects to be completed with the efficient use of resources.
Open to everyone
Aigrain argues that as it broadens both attention and cultural diversity, it is appropriate and significant to share. Market fundamentalism aims to turn all of culture into a commodity that is owned by individuals, and they want people to get permission before engaging in even the most derivative new creative endeavours.
However, In a commons-based participatory society, we need commons-based media and a commons-based Internet to build the communication commons. GitHub is open to everyone with free access, by significantly decentralizing open source, GitHub bridged this gap, It shifted from being more about the project to be more about the people, everyone is encouraged to write code that they find interesting and distribute it on the platform; this creation is frequently voluntary because, as Benkler puts it, people are “socially and psychologically motivated to do something fascinating” when working on commons-based projects.