Peer production

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Peer production (also known as mass collaboration [ citation needed ]) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the labor of many people is coordinated towards a shared outcome.

Contents

Overview

Peer production is a process taking advantage of new collaborative possibilities afforded by the internet and has become a widespread mode of labor. [1] [2] Free and open source software and open source hardware are two examples of peer production. One of the earliest instances of networked peer production is Project Gutenberg, a project in which volunteers make out-of-copyright works available online. [3] Other non-profit examples include Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia (which has been described as "one of the most classic examples" of the peer production concept [4] : 41 ), Linux, a computer operating system, and Mozilla, a browser. [4] : 55  For-profit enterprises mostly use partial implementations of peer production, and would include such sites as Delicious, Digg, Etsy, Goodreads, Flickr, Tripadvisor or Yelp. [5] [4] : 54  Peer production refers to the production process on which the previous examples are based. Commons-based peer production is a subset of peer production defined by its non-profit focus. [4] : 43 

Peer production occurs in a socio-technical system which allows thousands of individuals to effectively cooperate to create a non-exclusive given outcome. [6] Implanting the principle of open collaboration, participants of peer production projects can join and leave at will. [4] : 48  These collective efforts are informal and non-unionized. Peer production is a collaborative effort with no limit to the amount of discussion or changes that can be made to the product. However, as in the case of Wikipedia, a large amount, in fact the majority, of this collaborative effort is maintained by very few devoted and active individuals. [7]

From the organizational perspective, peer production is characterized by its minimal formal hierarchies, governance and leadership; in fact some even have a strong anti-hierarchical and leaderless ethos. [4] : 46 

Applications

Peer production is also expanding beyond knowledge production, in the realm of manufacturing. [8] For example, there are now several types of open-source solar-powered 3-D printers, [9] which can be used for production in off grid locations [10] and other forms of open source appropriate technology like the use of biomaterials. [11]

Peer production has also been utilized in producing collaborative Open Educational Resources (OERs). Writing Commons, an international open textbook spearheaded by Joe Moxley at the University of South Florida, has evolved from a print textbook into a crowd-sourced resource for college writers around the world. [12] Massive open online course (MOOC) platforms have also generated interest in building online eBooks. The Cultivating Change Community (CCMOOC) at the University of Minnesota is one such project founded entirely on a grassroots model to generate content. [13] In 10 weeks, 150 authors contributed more than 50 chapters to the CCMOOC eBook and companion site. [14] The Peer to Peer University has applied peer production principles to online open learning communities and peer learning.

Criticism

Several critics have challenged the prevailing optimism with which peer production is viewed.

Daniel Kreiss, Megan Finn, and Fred Turner criticize the consensus perspective on peer production as utopian. Asserting that this new mode of production challenges the traditional form of bureaucracy, they reference Max Weber’s analysis of modern bureaucracy and urge that this analysis be applied to peer production. They argue that bureaucracy is better equipped to handle social problems than peer production, which they consider unsustainable. As bureaucracy promotes a rationally organized, rule-oriented functioning of society, Kreiss, Finn, and Turner claim that peer production undermines this aspect due to its tendency to encourage individual behavior based on private morality. This tendency, they argue, degrades autonomy by “collapsing public and private boundaries,” allowing people's professional lives to extend into their private domains. [15]

Other critics claim that the participatory nature of peer production is apt to generate misinformation and products of inferior quality. In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen assesses peer-produced content on the Internet and asserts that it exists as a “smokescreen” which emptily promises more truth and deeper knowledge, but actually leading to the disappearance of truth. According to Keen, the Internet advocates peer production to a questionable degree by permitting anyone to post information freely. This form of peer production, he cautions, leaves room for people to plagiarize ideas and distort original thoughts, which he says ultimately creates an uncertainty in the validity of information. [16]

Another critic, Jaron Lanier, cites Wikipedia as an example of how dependence on mass collaboration may result in unreliable or biased information. He warns that websites like Wikipedia promote the notion of the “collective” as all knowing, and that this concentrated influence stands in direct contrast to representative democracy. [17]

In addition to these adversarial views, some critics assert that peer production does not perform as well in some contexts as it does in others. [18] Paul Duguid suggests that peer production works less efficiently outside of software development, stating that continued reliance on peer production in various domains of information production will necessitate a search for new ways to guarantee quality. [3] Yochai Benkler similarly proposes that peer production may produce functional works like encyclopedias more proficiently than creative works. [18] Critics continue to doubt extensive collaboration and its ability to yield high quality outputs. [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collaboration</span> Act of working together

Collaboration is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. The form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. Teams that work collaboratively often access greater resources, recognition and rewards when facing competition for finite resources.

Information ecology is the application of ecological concepts for modeling the information society. It considers the dynamics and properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment. "Information ecology" often is used as metaphor, viewing the information space as an ecosystem, the information ecosystem.

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-based projects generally have less rigid hierarchical structures than those under more traditional business models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharing</span> Joint use of a resource or space

Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space. It is also the process of dividing and distributing. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of inherently finite goods, such as a common pasture or a shared residence. Still more loosely, "sharing" can actually mean giving something as an outright gift: for example, to "share" one's food really means to give some of it as a gift. Sharing is a basic component of human interaction, and is responsible for strengthening social ties and ensuring a person’s well-being.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michel Bauwens</span> Belgian activist

Michel Bauwens is a Belgian theorist in the emerging field of peer-to-peer (P2P), a writer, and a conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. Bauwens founded the P2P Foundation, a global organization of researchers working in open collaboration in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of essays, including his thesis The Political Economy of Peer Production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yochai Benkler</span> Israeli-American technology law expert, political economist, and author

Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In academia he is best known for coining the term commons-based peer production and his widely cited 2006 book The Wealth of Networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commons</span> Shared resources

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

Networked learning is a process of developing and maintaining connections with people and information, and communicating in such a way so as to support one another's learning. The central term in this definition is connections. It adopts a relational stance in which learning takes place both in relation to others and in relation to learning resources. In design and practice, networked learning is intended to facilitate evolving sets of connections between learners and their interpersonal communities, knowledge contexts, and digital technologies.

The Carr–Benkler wager between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr concerned the question whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.

Industrial information economy is a term coined by Harvard University Professor Yochai Benkler. Benkler discusses this term in-depth in his 2006 book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

<i>The Wealth of Networks</i> 2006 book by Yochai Benkler

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source economics</span>

Open-source economics is an economic platform based on open collaboration for the production of software, services, or other products.

The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Produsage</span> User-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments

Produsage is a portmanteau of the words production and usage, coined by German-Australian media scholar Axel Bruns and popularized in his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Produsage is the type of user-led content creation that takes place in a variety of online environments, open source software, and the blogosphere. The concept blurs the boundaries between passive consumption and active production. The distinction between producers and consumers or users of content has faded, as users play the role of producers whether they are aware of this role or not. The hybrid term produser refers to an individual who is engaged in the activity of produsage. This concept is similar and related to commons-based peer production, a term coined by Yochai Benkler.

Distributed manufacturing also known as distributed production, cloud producing, distributed digital manufacturing, and local manufacturing is a form of decentralized manufacturing practiced by enterprises using a network of geographically dispersed manufacturing facilities that are coordinated using information technology. It can also refer to local manufacture via the historic cottage industry model, or manufacturing that takes place in the homes of consumers.

Open collaboration refers to any "system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who cooperate voluntarily to create a product of economic value, which is made freely available to contributors and noncontributors alike." It is prominently observed in open source software, and has been initially described in Richard Stallman's GNU Manifesto, as well as Eric S. Raymond's 1997 essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Beyond open source software, open collaboration is also applied to the development of other types of mind or creative works, such as information provision in Internet forums, or the production of encyclopedic content in Wikipedia.

Distributed Collaboration is a way of collaboration wherein participants, regardless of their location, work together to reach a certain goal. This usually entails use of increasingly popular cyberinfrastructure, such as emails, instant messaging and document sharing platforms to reduce the limitations of the users trying to work together from remote locations by overcoming physical barriers of geolocation and also to some extent, depending on the application used, the effects of working together in person. For example, a caller software that can be used to bring all collaborators into a single call-in for easier dissemination of ideas.

Open manufacturing, also known as open production, maker mamanufacturing or material peer production and with the slogan "Design Global, Manufacture Local" is a new model of socioeconomic production in which physical objects are produced in an open, collaborative and distributed manner and based on open design and open-source principles.

Cosmopolitan localism or Cosmolocalism is a social innovation approach to community development that seeks to link local and global communities through resilient infrastructures that bring production and consumption closer together, building on distributed systems. The concept of cosmopolitan localism was pioneered by Wolfgang Sachs, a scholar in the field of environment, development, and globalization. Sachs is known as one of the many followers of Ivan Illich and his work has influenced the green and ecological movements. Contrary to glocalisation, cosmolocalism moves from locality to universality, acknowledging the local as the locus of social co-existence and emphasizing the potential of global networking beyond capitalist market rules.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open source</span> Source code made freely available

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open source appropriate technology, and open source drug discovery.

References

  1. ↑ Benkler, Yochai (April 2003). "Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information". Duke Law Journal. 52 (6): 1245. Retrieved 2011-11-28.
  2. ↑ Kostakis, V. 2019. How to Reap the Benefits of the “Digital Revolution”? Modularity and the Commons. Halduskultuur: The Estonian Journal of Administrative Culture and Digital Governance, Vol 20(1):4–19.
  3. 1 2 Duguid, Paul (2006-10-02). "Limits of self-organization: Peer production and "laws of quality"". First Monday. 11 (10). doi: 10.5210/fm.v11i10.1405 . ISSN   1396-0466 . Retrieved 2014-09-26.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dariusz Jemielniak; Aleksandra Przegalinska (18 February 2020). Collaborative Society. MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-35645-9.
  5. ↑ Benkler, Y., Shaw, A., & Hill, B. M. (2015). Peer production: A form of collective intelligence (pp. 175-204). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  6. ↑ Benkler, Yochai and Nissenbaum Helen, "Commons based Peer Production and Virtue"
  7. ↑ Wu, F.; Wilkinson, D. M.; Huberman, B. A. (August 2009). "Feedback Loops of Attention in Peer Production". 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering. Vol. 4. pp. 409–415. doi:10.1109/CSE.2009.430. ISBN   978-1-4244-5334-4. S2CID   7948476.
  8. ↑ Kostakis, Vasilis; Latoufis, Kostas; Liarokapis, Minas; Bauwens, Michel (2018). "The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: Two illustrative cases". Journal of Cleaner Production. 197: 1684–1693. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.09.077. S2CID   43975556.
  9. ↑ King, Debbie L.; Babasola, Adegboyega; Rozario, Joseph; Pearce, Joshua M. (2014). "Mobile Open-Source Solar-Powered 3-D Printers for Distributed Manufacturing in Off-Grid Communities". Challenges in Sustainability. 2 (1): 18–27. doi: 10.12924/cis2014.02010018 .
  10. ↑ D.J. Pangburn (Nov 7, 2014). "How 3D Printers Are Boosting Off-The-Grid, Underdeveloped Communities". MotherBoard.
  11. ↑ Rocco, G.R. (2015). "Developing Maker Economies in Post-Industrial Cities: Applying Commons Based Peer Production to Mycelium Biomaterials". Masters Theses. University of Massachusetts Amherst. doi:10.7275/7047367.
  12. ↑ "About." "Writing Commons". CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Retrieved 2013-02-11.
  13. ↑ Anders, Abram (November 9, 2012). "Experimenting with MOOCs: Network-based Communities of Practice.". Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing Conference. Mankato, MN. Archived from the original on 2013-11-07. Retrieved 2013-02-11.
  14. ↑ "About." "Cultivating Change Community". CC BY-NC 3.0. Archived from the original on 2013-06-30. Retrieved 2013-02-11.
  15. ↑ Kreiss, Daniel; Finn, Megan; Turner, Fred. "The limits of peer production". Sage Journals. Sage. pp. 243–259. Retrieved 2014-05-24.
  16. ↑ Keen, Andrew (2007). The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (3rd ed.). Crown Business.
  17. ↑ Lanier, Jaron (2010). You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  18. 1 2 3 Benkler, Yochai; Shaw, Aaron; Mako Hill, Benjamin. "Peer Production: A Modality of Collective Intelligence" (PDF). Retrieved 2014-05-24.
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