Peer production

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Peer production (also known by the term mass collaboration) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome. The content is produced by the general public rather than by paid professionals and experts in the field.^{[1][dubious – discuss]} In these communities, the efforts of a large number of people are coordinated to create meaningful projects. The information age, especially the Internet, has provided the peer production process with new collaborative possibilities and has become a dominant and important mode of producing information.^[2] Free and open source software are two examples of modern processes of peer production. One of the earliest instances of networked peer production is Project Gutenberg,^[3] a project that involves volunteers that make "etexts" from out-of-copyright works available online.^[4] Modern examples are Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, and Linux, a computer operating system. For-profit enterprises mostly use partial implementations of peer production. Amazon built itself around user reviews, Google is constituted by user-generated content (i.e. Youtube)^{[citation needed]}. Peer production refers to the production process on which the previous examples are based. Commons-based peer production is a subset of peer production.

Peer production occurs in a socio-technical system which allows thousands of individuals to effectively cooperate to create a non-exclusive given outcome.^[5] These collective efforts are informal. 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 a relatively small number of devoted and active individuals.^[6] It is the consistent activity of these individuals which dictates the success on a given project.^{[citation needed]}

Crowdsourcing products like community cookbooks were a form of peer production. Gooseberry Patch^[7] has used its customer/friend community to create its line of exclusive cookbooks for over 18 years.

Many organizations research the peer production phenomena^{[citation needed]}, including the P2P Foundation, run by Michel Bauwens and Franco Iacomella.

References

External links

• TED: Ideas worth spreading - Yochai Benkler introduces peer production.
• The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing Michel Bauwens, We Magazine Volume 2
• Quality Management of Peer Production (eLearning)

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