1 Free Culture Communities: Facing Organizational Challenges

Transnational communities play an increasingly important role in the field of digital knowledge and culture both as providers of goods and services via commons based production (Benkler 2006) and as actors in regulatory processes (Djelic and Quack, forthcoming). While a huge variety of phenomena are subsumed under the umbrella of diverse “community ” concepts, most of them share a reluctance to investigate the relationship between communities and related formal organizations (for an exception see O’Mahoney and Bechky 2008). The main reason for this decentred role of formal organization in contemporary community theorizing is probably the convention to describe organizational features and dynamics of communities in contrast to classic organizational bureaucracies, and to thereby emphasize the informal nature of communities. However, for communities in general and for the free culture movement in particular, formal organizations are of great importance in at least two regards: First, even the most open and self-organizing community projects sooner or later develop formal organizational structures to make their work sustainable and to manage relations with external actors. Second, formal organizations play a major role as adopters, users or sponsors of community work and products. In my research so far, I have concentrated on these two relatively distinct relations of community development and formal organizing: Together with Sigrid Quack I have investigated the interplay of different types of communities in the realm of the organizational network of Creative Commons (Dobusch and Quack 2008; 2009). In a current research project we are comparing the organizational structure and transnationalization dynamics of Creative Commons with the ones of Wikimedia and its local chapter organizations.1 Contrasting these two cases highlights not only the importance of organizational participation for community building and development but also the difficulties of organizing participation 1 Some work in progress can be found on our research blog „governance across borders“, in particular th