Commons-based Peer Production Information

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization (and often, but not always, without, or with decentralized, financial compensation). Often used interchangeably with the term social production, Benkler compares commons-based peer production to firm production (where a centralized decision process decides what has to be done and by whom) and market-based production (when tagging different prices to different jobs serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job).

The term was first introduced in Benkler's seminal paper Coase's Penguin.^[1] His 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks expands significantly on these ideas. In this book, Benkler makes a distinction between Commons-based Peer Production and Peer Production. The former is based on sharing resources among widely distributed individuals who cooperate with each other. The latter term is a subset of commons-based production practices. It refers to a production process that depend on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized. YouTube and Facebook, for example, are based on this kind of peer production.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, in their book Wikinomics, offer their insight on the incentive mechanism behind common-based peer production. "People participate in peer production communities for a wide range of intrinsic and self-interested reasons....basically, people who participate in peer production communities love it. They feel passionate about their particular area of expertise and revel in creating something new or better." ^[2]

Another definition, by Aaron Krowne (Free Software Magazine):

"commons-based peer production refers to any coordinated, (chiefly) internet-based effort whereby volunteers contribute project components, and there exists some process to combine them to produce a unified intellectual work. CBPP covers many different types of intellectual output, from software to libraries of quantitative data to human-readable documents (manuals, books, encyclopedias, reviews, blogs, periodicals, and more)."^[3]

Examples

Examples of projects using commons-based peer production include:

• Linux, a computer operating system
• Slashdot, a news and announcements website
• Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia
• Distributed Proofreaders, which proof reads public domain etexts for publication on Project Gutenberg
• SETI@home, a project which searches for extra terrestrial life
• Kuro5hin, a discussion site for technology and culture
• Clickworkers, a citizen science program
• Sourceforge, a software development organization
• RepRap Project, a project to create an open-source self-copying 3D printer.
• Pirate Bay, a shared index of bittorrents (under legal scrutiny in Sweden as of February 2009)
• OpenStreetMap, a free map of the world
• Appropedia, a project for development of Open Source Appropriate Technology

Outgrowths

Several unexpected but foreseeable outgrowths have been:

• Customization/Specialization. With free and open source software small groups have the capability to customize a large project according to specific needs and wants.
• Immortality. Once code is released under a copyleft free software license the genie cannot be put back into the bottle.
• Cross-fertilization. Experts in a field can work on more than one project with no legal hassles.
• Technology Revisions: A core technology gives rise to new implementations of existing projects.
• Technology Clustering: Groups of products tend to cluster around a core set of technology and integrate with one another.

Related concepts

The ease in and leaving is a feature of adhocracies.

The principle of commons-based peer production is similar to collective invention, a model of open innovation in economics coined by Robert Allen.^[4]

Open community

Open Community is an application of the idea of open source to other collaborative effort. What distinguishes an open community from a closed one is that anyone may join and contribute, that the direction and goals are determined collaboratively by all members of the community, and that the resulting work is made available under a free license.

Projects

An Open Community Project is a software project that offers a "Free Space" to people around a topic that unites them and is open to the whole Worldwide Community.

Open means free as in not having to pay to contribute or adhere and open means it is not discriminating in that some group would be excluded to participate in developing the project.

Open Community Projects take place in the Real World as well as in the "Virtual World" and are often supported by Open Software such as wiki's, mailinglists/discussion fora, chat, polling tools and many more.

Example where the term is used: "It would be a good idea if the United Nations, the USA and the EU and other democracies would also offer the free Hard Disk space they have to their communities for them to develop Open Community Projects on them and a Free Space, thus to foster participation of their and other citizens into democracies and keeping the democratic level in their democracies as high as possible."^{[citation needed]}

Criticism

Some believe that the commons-based peer production (CBPP) vision, while powerful and groundbreaking, needs to be strengthened at its root because of some allegedly wrong assumptions concerning free and open source software (FOSS).

The CBPP literature regularly and explicitly quotes FOSS products as examples of artifacts “emerging” by virtue of mere cooperation, with no need for supervising leadership (without «market signals or managerial commands», in Benkler’s words).

It can be argued, however, that in the development of any less than trivial piece of software, irrespective of whether it be FOSS or proprietary, a subset of the (many) participants always play -explicitly and deliberately- the role of leading system and subsystem designers, determining architecture and functionality, while most of the people work “underneath” them in a logical, functional sense^[5].

See also

• Anti-rival good
• Citizen science
• Collaboration
• Collaborative software development model
• Knowledge commons
• Crowdsourcing
• Flow (psychology) - a theory describing the conditions under which work can be rewarding without compensation
• Gift economy
• Mass collaboration
• Peer review
• Prosumerism
• Open Business
• Open Music Model
• Open Source Appropriate Technology
• Formal education
• Nonformal learning

References

1. ^ Coase's Penguin or Linux and The nature of the firm - a paper by Yochai Benkler defining what Commons-Based Peer Production is and how it works. The paper also includes a long study of what motivates contributors.
2. ^ Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006), by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio Books, p 70
3. ^ Krowne, Aaron (March 1, 2005). "The FUD based encyclopedia: Dismantling the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt aimed at Wikipedia and other free knowledge sources". Free Software Magazine.
4. ^ Robert C. Allen (1983): Collective invention. In: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 4(1), p. 1-24
5. ^ Magrassi, P. (2010). Free and Open-Source Software is not an Emerging Property but Rather the Result of Studied Design" Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management & Organisational Learning, Hong Kong Polytechnic, Nov. 2010

External links

• Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler's 2006 book about commons-based peer production.
• Open Source Drug Discovery Foundation - Open Source Drug Discovery Foundation is an international non-profit foundation based in India to accelerate drug discovery for infectious diseases.The foundation is based in India.
• The Foundation for P2P Alternatives - Function as a clearing-house for open/free, participatory/p2p and commons-oriented initiatives.
• The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing Michel Bauwens, We Magazine Volume 2
• Peerconomy.org - Wiki on peer economy.
• Thinkvast [1]

Categories: Economic systems | Collaboration | Public commons | Free software culture and documents | Internet culture

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See Also:

• Computers: Software: Shareware: Windows: Database
• Product Activation
• Product Bundling