Category:Peerproduction

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This will function as a mini-guide to Peer Production proper, in the more narrow sense, so that this key material is no longer only available through our almost unwieldy section on P2P Business trends in general.

The P2P Foundation supports the research initiative: Critical Studies in Peer Production [1]


(status update: Ported: selections from the first three columns of P2P Business only. Thanks to Dante Monson for assistance with the further porting for this section.)


Introduction

  1. Christian Siefkes: Peer Producing Plenty in the Physical World
  2. Karim Lakhani on the Open Source Software communities Open Development process [2]
  3. A Bibliography on Peer Production. Recommendations by James Boyle.
  4. Georgie BC: How a Stigmergy of Actions Replaces Representation of Persons‎
  5. Dmytri Kleiner: Flawed Circuits of Value in the Lulz Economy

Characteristics of Peer Production

  1. Beyond Classes‎
  2. Beyond Commodity‎
  3. Beyond Exchange‎
  4. Beyond Exclusion
  5. Beyond Labor‎
  6. Beyond Money
  7. Beyond Politics
  8. Beyond Scarcity
  9. Beyond Socialism


  • Peer production carries with it many different fundamental innovations, that are starkly different from traditional business practice. Here are a number of these practices, contrasted with the practices

of the market and the business firm:

  1. Anti-Credentialism: refers to the inclusiveness of peer production. What matters is the ability to carry out a particular task, not any formal a priori credential ( ≠ credentialism).
  2. Anti-Rivalry: sharing the created goods does not diminish the value of the good, but actually enhances it ( ≠ rivalry).
  3. Communal Validation: the quality control is not a 'a priori' condition of participation, but a post-hoc control process, usually community-driven ( ≠ hierarchical control).
  4. Distribution of Tasks: there are no roles and jobs to be performed, only specific tasks to be carried out ( ≠ division of labor).
  5. Equipotentiality: people are judged on the particular aspects of their being that is involved in the execution of a particular task ( ≠ people ranking).
  6. For Benefit: (Benefit Sharing; Benefit-Driven Production). The production aims to create use value or 'benefits' for its user community, not profits for shareholders ( ≠ for-profit).
  7. Forking: the freedom to copy and modify includes the possibility to take the project into a different direction ( ≠ one authorized version).
  8. Granularity: refers to the effort to create the smallest possible modules (see Modularity infra), so that the treshold of participation for carrying out tasks is lowered to the lowest possible extent.
  9. Holoptism; transparency is the default state of information about the project; all additions can be seen and verified and are sourced ( ≠ panoptism).
  10. Modularity: tasks, products and services are organized as modules, that fit with other modules in a puzzle that is continuously re-assembled; anybody can contribute to any module. (See also: Composability, from software engineering terminology, [http//:wikipedia.org/wiki/Composability])
  11. Negotiated Coordination: conflicts are resolved through an ongoing and mediated dialogue, not by fiat and top-down decisions ( ≠ centralized and hierarchical decision-making). (See also "subsidiarity", "the delegation of decision-making power over a particular area of operation by those working directly in that area." [3])
  12. Permissionlessness: one does not need permission to contribute to the commons( ≠ permission culture).
  13. Produsage: there is no strict separation between production and consumption, and users can produce solutions ( ≠ production for consumption).
  14. Stigmergy: there is a signalling language that permits system needs to be broadcast and matched to contributions.

Suggested characteristics: (composability, Subsidiarity)

Citations

“Since evolutionary changes are not completely predictable, it is obvious that there is room in the world for what we call free will. Each individual decision to accept, resist, or change the current order alters the probability that a particular evolution outcome will occur. While the course of cultural evolution is never free from systemic influence, some moments are probably more “open” than others. The most open moments, it appears to me, are those at which a mode of production reaches its limits of growth and a new mode of production must soon be adopted. We are rapidly moving toward such an opening.”

- Marvin Harris - “Cannibals and Kings” P.291


On the connection between Modularity and Sharing

"If the stuff to hand isn't modular, you can't really share, because your stuff isn't compatible with other people's stuff. If it isn't modular, you can't share out tasks and scale. If you can't share out tasks, you can't have people working independently, at their own pace and in their own way, which means the project isn't really open. If it isn't modular, you can't swap in some new elements while leaving everything else untouched, which means no "release early, release often", no experimentation, no rapid evolution. Modularity is indispensable."

- Glyn Moody: [4]

Key Resources

Key Articles

  1. Paul Hartzog on the Advantages of Scale of Openness and Peer Production
  2. Dmytri Kleiner's Critique of Peer Production Ideology
  3. Michel Bauwens: Is Peer Production a Real Mode of Production?
  4. The 'Circulation of the Common': Analytical concept proposed by Nick Dyer-Witheford in a landmark essay of the same title.. It refers to the social reproduction mechanism of Peer Production, in a process analogous with the Circulation of Capital described by Marx. [6]
  5. P2P Is Not a Mode of ProductionToni Prug. Journal of Peer Production, Issue 1, 2012. [7]
  6. How the Iron Law of Oligarchy Extends to Peer Production

See also:

  • Ten Peer_Production_Patterns. Stefan Meretz. Comment by Michel Bauwens: A word of caution. The text by Stefan Meretz is useful to understand the post-capitalist patterns that are inherent in peer production, however, it also abstracts from its embeddedness in present society and the way these aspects are instrumentalized by the present society and economic system, and create hybrid mechanisms of mutual adaptation. It also skirts around the central question of the self-reproduction of the means of production (however, see pattern 10 on the Germ Theory of change.

Key Reports

From the Industrial Cooperation Project:

  1. Peer Production and Industrial Cooperation in Biotechnology, Genomics and Proteomics
  2. Peer Production and Industrial Cooperation in Alternative Energy‎‎
  3. Peer Production and Industrial Cooperation in Educational Materials‎
  4. Peer Production and Industrial Cooperation in Telecommunications

Key Video

Subcategories

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Pages in category "Peerproduction"

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