View source for 3.2 Explaining the Emergence of P2P Economics

'''3.2 Explaining the Emergence of P2P Economics'''

'''3.2.A. Advantages of the free software/open sources production model'''

[[3.2.B. How far can peer production be extended?]]

'''3.2.A. Advantages of the free software/open sources production model'''

Why is are free cooperative projects of autonomous agents, i.e. peer production models, emerging now? Part of the explanation is cultural, located in a changing set of values affecting large parts of the population, mostly in the Western world. The World Values research by R. Inglehart (Inglehart, 1989) has shown that there is a large number of people who identify with post-material values and who have moved up in the ‘hierarchy of values’ as defined by Abraham Maslow. For those people who feel relatively secure materially, and are not taken in by the infinite desires promoted by consumer society, it is inevitable that they will look to other means of fulfillment, in the area of creation, relationships, spirituality. The demand for free cooperation in a context of self-unfolding of the individual, is a corollary of this development. Just as the development of filesharing is related to the existence of an abundance of unused computing resources due to the differential between computer processing and human processing (the fact that the latter is much slower creates the abundance in PC-resources), P2P as a cultural phenomena is strongly related to the development of a mass intellectually and the resulting abundance in creative resources. Not only underemployment of these resources, but also the growing dearth of meaning associated with working for a consumption-oriented corporation, creates a surplus of creative labor that wants to invest in meaningful projects associated with the direct creation of use value.

Apart from these cultural and 'subjective' reasons, there is of course the availability of a global technological framework for non-local communication, coordination and cooperation, it is strongly linked to the emergence of the Internet. As we have outlined in our introduction, there is now a peer to peer infrastructure available through distributed computing, an alternative media and communication infrastructure, and a platform for global autonomous cooperation. In general we can say that it is access to distributed capital goods, that allows for the generation of bottom-up ad hoc networks of people and devices. This fact that 'capital outlays' can be generated without recourse to access to financial capital or the means provided by the state or corporations, is itself a huge advantage.

There are other good objective reasons that drive the adoption of 'open collaborative processes: the very 'diffuse' nature of contemporary innovation works against individual appropriation, since there are myriads of inputs necessary to produce a given output, and were that output to be frozen through rigid intellectual protection, it would stifle the innovation process, and put these entities at a competitive disadvantage .

By abolishing distinctions between producer and consumer, open source processes dramatically increase their access to expertise, to a global arena networked through the internet. No commercial entity can afford such a large army of volunteers. So one very clear advantage is the availability of a much larger pool of intelligence which can be devoted to problem-solving. Peer production, though often taken place through a large number of small teams, also allows for swarming tactics, i.e. the coordinated attention of many people. It is sometimes called the 'piranha effect' as it involves repeated tugging of code or text by many different people, until the result is 'right' and communally validated. Commercial software, which forbids other developers and users from ameliorating it, is much more static in its development and has many other flaws .  With FLOSS (=Free Libre Open Sources Software) projects, any user can participate, at least through a bug report, or by offering his comments. This 'flexible degree of involvement'  is a very important characteristic of commons-based peer production, which usually combine a very motivated core who operate in a onion-like structure surrounded by, a flexible periphery of co-developers and occasional collaborators, with many degrees in between, and all have the possibility of permanently 'modulating' their contributions for optimal fit in their personal contexts. Indeed, because the cooperation is free, participants function passionately and optimally without coercion. 

The ‘Wisdom Game’, which means that social influence is gained through reputation, augments the motivation to participate with high quality interventions. In surveys of participants of  such projects, the most frequently cited motivation is the writing of the code itself, i.e. the making of the software, and the associated ‘learning’ .  Because a self-unfolding logic is followed which looks for optimal feeling of flow, the participants are collaborating when they feel most energized. Open source availability of the source code and documentation means that the products can be continuously improved. Because of the social control and the reputation game, abusive behavior can be controlled and abuse of power is similarly dependent on collective approval. Eric Raymond has summarized the advantages of peer production in his seminal The Cathedral and the Bazaar: 1) programmers motivated by real problems work better than salary men who do not freely choose their area of work; 2) "good programmers can write, but great programmers can rewrite", the latter is greatly accelerated by the availability of open code; 3) more users can see more bugs, the number of collaborators and available brainpower is several orders of magnitude greater; 4) continuous multiple corrections hasten development, while version control permits falling back on earlier versions in case of instability of the new version; 5) the Internet allowed global cooperation to occur.

In the sphere of immaterial production and distribution, such as for example the distribution of music, the advantages of online distribution through P2P processes are unmatched. In the sphere of material production, through essentially the contributions of knowledge workers, similarly P2P processes are more efficient than centralized hierarchical control.

Yochai Benkler, in a famous essay, ‘Coase’s Penguin’, has given a rationale for the emergence of P2P production methodologies, based on the ideas of ‘transaction costs’. In the physical world, the cost of bringing together thousands of participants may be very high, and so it may be cheaper to have centralized firms than an open market. This is why earlier experiences with collectivized economies could not work. But in the immaterial sphere used for the production of informational goods, the transaction goods are near-zero  and therefore, open source production methods are cheaper and more efficient.  The example of Thinkcycle , where open source methods are used for a large number of projects, such as fighting cholera, show a wide applicability of the method. Open source methods have already been applied with a certain success in the biotechnogical field   and is being proposed as an alternative in an increasing number of new areas  . An interesting twist on the transaction cost theory of Yochai Benkler is given by Clay Shirky, who explains the role of 'mental transaction costs'  in the 'economy of attention', which to a large degree, explains the phenomenon of 'gratuity' in internet publishing, and why payment schemes, including micropayment, are so ineffective.

Aaron Krowne, writing for Free Software magazine, has proposed a set of laws to explain the higher efficiency of CBPP (= Commons-based peer production) models:

(Law 1.) When positive contributions exceed negative contributions by a sufficient factor in a CBPP project, the project will be successful.

This means that for every contributor that can ‘mess things up’, there have to be at least 10 others who can correct these mistakes. But in most projects the ration is 1 to 100 or 1 to 1000, so that quality can be maintained and improved over time.

(Law 2.) Cohesion quality is the quality of the presentation of the concepts in a collaborative component (such as an encyclopedia entry). Assuming the success criterion of Law 1 is met, cohesion quality of a component will overall rise. However, it may temporarily decline. The declines are by small amounts and the rises are by large amounts.

Individual contributions which may be useful by themselves but diminish the overall balance of the project, will always be discovered, so that decline can only be temporary.

(Corollary.) Laws 1 and 2 explain why cohesion quality of the entire collection (or project) increases over time: the uncoordinated temporary declines in cohesion quality cancel out with small rises in other components, and the less frequent jumps in cohesion quality accumulate to nudge the bulk average upwards. This is without even taking into account coverage quality, which counts any conceptual addition as positive, regardless of the elegance of its integration.


[[Category:Peerproduction]]

[[Category:Manufacturing]]

[[Category:P2P Theory]]