Peer production
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Peer production (also known by the term mass collaboration or commons-based peer production) 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 production of content by the general public rather than by paid professionals and experts in the field.[1] 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). 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.
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, including the P2P Foundation, run by Michel Bauwens and Franco Iacomella.
[edit] 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
- ^ "User Generated Content". Farlex. http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Peer+production. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
- ^ Benkler, Yochai (April 2003). "Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information". Duke Law Journal 52 (6): 1245. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1191&context=dlj. Retrieved 28 November 2011.
- ^ Hart, Michael Stern. "Project Gutenberg Canada". http://www.gutenberg.ca/.
- ^ Duguid, Paul. "Limits of self-organization: Peer Production and "Laws of Quality." First Monday Vol 11 No 10 (Oct 2 2006)
- ^ Benkler, Yochai and Nissenbaum Helen, "Commons based Peer Production and Virtue"
- ^ Huberman, Bernardo A, Wilkinson, Dennis M, Wu, Fang "Feedback loops of attention in peer production"
- ^ "Gooseberry Patch". Gooseberry Patch. http://www.gooseberrypatch.com/.
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