From Distribution to Contribution: Negotiating Justice Policies in Grassroots FOSS Communities

Paper Title

From Distribution to Contribution: Negotiating Justice Policies in Grassroots FOSS Communities

Publication Info

• Topic area: Justice and governance in grassroots digital infrastructures.
• Keywords: fairness, justice, grassroots, FOSS, governance, socio-technical systems, policy-in-code, contributional fairness, distributional fairness, sustainability.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Grassroots digital infrastructures face challenges in embedding fairness into governance, particularly in balancing distributional fairness (resource access) and contributional fairness (labor recognition). Existing research lacks insights into how justice claims materialize in large-scale, volunteer-driven infrastructures.
• Significance: Addressing fairness is critical for sustaining volunteer-driven communities, ensuring equitable participation, and aligning technical governance with community values.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work in HCI, food justice, and decentralized governance underscores the plurality of justice logics and the importance of community agency. However, there is limited understanding of how fairness becomes encoded into digital infrastructures and reshapes power and responsibility in practice.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The study examines Foodsharing.de, a grassroots FOSS platform, focusing on two justice-oriented features: the Cherry-Picking Rule (distributional fairness) and Commitment Statistics (contributional fairness). These features are analyzed as "policy-in-code" interventions.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduces the concept of "policy-in-code" to describe how encoded rules act as governance mechanisms in grassroots infrastructures.
  2. Demonstrates how fairness features reshape authority, recognition, and governance in a large-scale volunteer community.
  3. Highlights the entanglement of distributional and contributional fairness in practice.
  4. Proposes design principles for justice-oriented grassroots infrastructures, emphasizing contestability and accountable autonomy.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with members of Foodsharing.de, including developers, Ambassadors, and Foodsavers.
  2. Engaged in participant observation, ICT trace analysis, and long-term activist involvement.
  3. Analyzed qualitative data using reflexive thematic analysis, focusing on fairness negotiations, governance dynamics, and the socio-technical impacts of encoded rules.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • The Cherry-Picking Rule automated rotational access to sought-after stores, addressing distributional fairness but concentrating gatekeeping power with Ambassadors and Store Coordinators.
  • Commitment Statistics made contributions visible but privileged quantifiable actions, sidelining invisible labor and creating surveillance pressures.
  • Both features entangled distributional and contributional fairness, with claims to access often justified through contributions and vice versa.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Highlights how fairness features provoke ongoing negotiation rather than resolving disputes, offering a nuanced understanding of justice as a socio-technical process.
  • Extends prior small-scale studies by analyzing fairness dynamics in a large, decentralized infrastructure.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Empirical focus on City_A, a district with 450 members, supplemented by engagements with 10 other districts.
  • Data collected over 2.5 years, including interviews, field notes, and ICT trace analysis.
  • Themes included fairness perceptions, governance practices, and the socio-technical impacts of fairness features.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Findings are grounded in City_A, which may not reflect dynamics in less active districts.
  • Study primarily reflects perspectives of members engaged in fairness debates, potentially excluding less active participants.
  • Future research should explore contestability mechanisms, support for plurality, and long-term sustainability of justice-oriented infrastructures.

Summary

This paper examines how fairness becomes encoded into grassroots digital infrastructures, using Foodsharing.de as a case study. It introduces the concept of "policy-in-code" to analyze how justice-oriented features, such as the Cherry-Picking Rule and Commitment Statistics, reshape authority, recognition, and governance. The study finds that these features provoke ongoing negotiation rather than resolving disputes, with distributional and contributional fairness deeply entangled in practice. By highlighting the socio-technical dynamics of fairness, the paper offers design principles for justice-oriented infrastructures, emphasizing contestability, accountable autonomy, and the importance of sustaining negotiation over time.