Commons-based peer production

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Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Yale's Law 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 or financial compensation. He compares this 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).

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)."[1]

The term was first introduced in Yochai Benkler's seminal paper Coase's Penguin.[2] A more concise explanation, and an application of the model to the production of educational material, can be found in his "Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials".[3]

Examples of products created by means of commons-based peer production include Linux, a computer operating system; Slashdot, a news and announcements website; Kuro5hin, a discussion site for technology and culture; Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia; and Clickworkers, a collaborative scientific work.

The ease in joining 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]

In 2006 Yochai Benkler also published The Wealth of Networks[5], a book that builds heavily on the concept of commons-based peer production.

[edit] Outgrowths

Several unexpected but foreseeable outgrowths have been:

  • Customization/Specialization. With Open Source small groups are capable to customize a large project to specific needs.
  • Immortality. Once code is open-sourced 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.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ 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.
  2. ^ Coase's Penguin or Linux and The nature of the firm a paper by Yochai Benkler defining what is, and how Commons-Based Peer Production works, along with a long study of what motivates contributor.
  3. ^ Yochai Benkler: Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials
  4. ^ Robert C. Allen (1983): Collective invention. In: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 4(1), p. 1-24
  5. ^ Yochai Benkler (2006):The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press.
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