“Peer production”, open source project governance , and egality aren’t necessarily isomorphic or even congruent; but I don’t see egality and individual merit necessarily at odds. Ideally they are complementary parts of a system having separation of powers with appropriate, reciprocal checks and balances. The proper “radical leveling across society” of egality is a leveling of rights and rules, not of individual strengths and weaknesses. I see various degrees of hierarchy and other specific local arrangements as permissible aspects of egalitarian governance under the proper circumstances. The totally horizontal topology of OWS general assemblies won’t scale past some finite number of people (certainly not to 300 million), for example. Nor will “direct democracy” scale to 300 million people jointly participating in hundreds of separate votes per day. At some point additional structures and methods must seemingly be added. What makes the additional arrangements “good” or “bad” is the degree of democracy, the willing and informed consent of the parties, and the utility or fitness for the intended purposes. Beyond that there are all kinds of “best practices” of governance that stress transparency, accountability, fairness, etc. without being tied to strictly horizontal relations.

In FOSS, for example, peers are generally free to fork off of an existing code base any way they like, but altering code within existing projects or forks is subject to additional rules and restrictions determined by prior agreements between the contributing parties. In a FOSS “meritocracy”, the “merit” really applies more to the work and work products (quality, fitness for a purpose) than to the peers themselves as people. Ideally, meritocratic personnel status is just a proxy for work-related factors such as authorship, degree of facility or familiarity with a project or body of code , etc. People need to demonstrate “merit” commensurate with the project requirements if quality is of any concern.

So any practical form of egality (as opposed to a utopian form) stresses equality with respect to a common, fair, and appropriate set of rights and rules rather than equality of talents, experience, or work roles. Maximizing the latter can be a goal, but hardly a prerequisite, IMHO. There is a distinction between an equivalence of value, importance, dignity, etc. among persons and roles as opposed to an equality of effort, experience, or expertise.

The dreaded specters of “merit” and “expertise” are not the real enemies of egality. They are really only evil when they serve (as indeed they often do) as euphemisms for corruption, injustice, and exploitation.

PR