Peer to Peer Upstreamers

Peer to Peer Upstreamers is a trend analysis by Jaap van Till,written for a Dutch audience, but translated here.

The full article is at http://www.vantill.dds.nl/p2pupstreamers.html

It originally appeared in Dutch, in Netkwesties, at http://www.netkwesties.nl/editie136/column1.html

Here's an excerpt:

"P2P Culture is a massive cultural movement based on communication for cooperation through Internet. It is in my view the successor of the present wave of ‘Creative Class’ & ‘Netocracy’ Media Power, based on broadcasting of experiences and meme-events to consuming individuals. In contrast to that, scientists have known for ages that they can learn very much by sending their new measurements and interpretations to their peers, who can respond with a useful comment or contribution of themselves. You get back more by giving something away which is not deminished: useful knowledge. Scientists and knowledge workers also notify each other in their ‘network’ on useful articles and messages. Something in the range between: sharing of unverified gossip to exchanging help-actions that solve practical problems. They learn from each other that way! Essential is that together with a suggested article or referral to ‘somebody who might help’ a recommendation is attached. With every message goes an explicit or implicit valuation and or rating. So P2P people ‘pay’ each other in the form of applicable knowledge or ‘credits’ in the form of credibility.

People who cooperate and collaborate in this way locally or through Internet across time, distances and organizational boundaries do or don’t build up credibility and respect from peers if their messages contributions and referrals prove to be useful in practice. Like for instance in the p2p “Open Sourceâ€? software development movement, of which the group behind “Firefoxâ€? is an example. These activities are, at least not directly, related to making money, although what is done and built is very valuable. The process of p2p contributions and community-shared messages typically creates a “commonsâ€?. That is a virtuous circle situation, which grows by appreciation-tags is such a way that more value and appeal is added than taken out. Other examples of such very non-tragic commons are: the MSN-cloud, the Skype community, Marktplaats.nl, eBay.com and Amazon.com. In my opinion the mentioned mechanism of growth by p2p appreciation is why eBay did appreciate the builders of Skype with a couple of billion dollars. The key is not the buying power of the Skype consumers (tired) but the activities and p2p contributions of the (wired)citizens of the Skype community. Ebay value seekers can network with p2p appreciation talking Skypers.

In companies and value chains p2p activities are the basic stimuli of virtual organizations and business processes. Without them work would grind to a sudden halt. Curiously enough you will find no formal traces of p2p communication on organization charts, budgets or activity plans. Controlaholic managers simply did not and will not notice p2p. That is their problem, not ours.Inevitably web-based business-to-business (b2b) computer applications are appearing that function across fences of companies supported by cross-boundary p2p collaboration."