Patterns of Self-Organising in the Bitcoin Online Community: Code Forking as Organising in Digital Infrastructure

Digital infrastructures play an increasingly central role in shaping existing organisations and creating new ones. Research on digital infrastructure has rested on the assumption that infrastructures are developed to support pre-existing organised activities. However, with the rise of new digital infrastructures supporting open source projects and blockchain communities such as Bitcoin, development of the technological infrastructure also gives rise to a new way of self-organising. Specifically, forking of the underlying source code and subsequent community adoption is increasingly observed to trigger new patterns of self-organising. In order to explore and develop this concept, this paper investigates a case of such distributed digital community: the emergence of the Bitcoin community around a specific instantiation of the Blockchain infrastructure. Our study examines how the community emerges, and how changes in the source code lead to different patterns of self-organising. The paper develops a conceptual framework of self-organising in distributed communities emerging around digital infrastructures.