The Philanthropy Scale: a Sociological Perspective in Measuring New Forms of Pro Social Behaviour

In wealthy countries, philanthropy is conspicuous back on stage. It appears in new forms, worldwide. As a result, scholarly attention for philanthropy is growing. Philanthropic goals refer to persons, groups and communities who, in most cases, are not personally known to the giver. In research, however, philanthropic motivations of individuals are usually measured by socio-psychological scales which presuppose direct interactions. Measuring philanthropy could therefore be improved by incorporating a sociological frame of reference as well. As a starting point, this article presents a preliminary version of the philanthropy scale that has been tested in the panel survey of the Giving in the Netherlands (GIN) study. The results are discussed in terms of shortcomings and challenges for further research.

Governance of Massive Multiauthor Collaboration – Linux, Wikipedia, and Other Networks: Governed by Bilateral Contracts, Partnerships, or Something in Between?

Open collaborative projects are moving to the foreground of knowledge production. Some online user communities develop into longterm projects that generate a highly valuable and at the same time freely accessible output. Traditional copyright law that is organized around the idea of a single creative entity is not well equipped to accommodate the needs of these forms of collaboration. In order to enable a peculiar network-type of interaction participants instead draw on public licensing models that determine the freedoms to use individual contributions. With the help of these access rules the operational logic of the project can be implemented successfully. However, as the case of the Wikipedia GFDL-CC license transition demonstrates, the adaptation of access rules in networks to new circumstances raises collective action problems and suffers from pitfalls caused by the fact that public licensing is grounded in individual copyright. Legal governance of open collaboration projects is a largely unexplored field. The article argues that the license steward of a public license assumes the position of a fiduciary of the knowledge commons generated under the license regime. Ultimately, the governance of decentralized networks translates into a composite of organizational and contractual elements. It is concluded that the production of global knowledge commons relies on rules of transnational private law.