"Version control" platforms such as Github and Gitlab help store everyone's work, keep track of changes and monitor the productivity and popularity of different contributors.

The market dominance of git as a version control tool, and of issues as a way to modularise work and manage tech-debt in public codebases have proved that decentralised work is also possible, at least in the software development space.

The irony here is that the internet is a machine for solving collective action problems. Wikis let millions of people coordinate their labor to produce all manner of materials (most notably, the greatest encyclopedia the world has ever seen), and source-control systems like git let large numbers of people collaborate to build software together (mos... See more