Collaborative Production

Definition

Mathieu O'Neil:

"Although we refer in shorthand to “Collaborative Production”, in fact, speaking of Open Informational Peer to peer Production might be more appropriated.

These four are the minimum terms which define the features of the modalities described by the above mentioned concepts. By analyzing them, we will have an operational definition of the phenomenon, based on the contributions of the above mentioned authors.

a) Production:

Three issues regarding the term production.

i) When talking about collaborative production we are not concerned with the distribution, exchange or consumption phenomena, but with the -original or not- creation, generation, production which takes shape through a set of specific organizational forms. This implies, in order to use a common expression from the intellectual property world, the existence of a certain level of inventive activity (OECD, 2007:18) which distinguish the production from the mere copy or spread of a certain piece of knowledge. Naturally, the boundary of this distinction can be very variable.

ii) In order to speak of collaborative production is a necessary condition that the process endures over time, thus not being based on casual interactions. (Vercelli, 2006:56). This does not mean that every single contributor must have a long commitment to a specific project, but that the productive process as a whole has a certain diachronic durationvii.

iii) Moreover, the result of the production, the output, has the distinctive feature of being consumed or used by the same networks which produce it. The producers are, at the same time, consumers or users of the goods they produce. They are prosumers, according to Toffler´s expression (1981) which was developed then by Tapscott and Williams (2005: 191)

b) Informational:

Three points have to be remarked here.

i) We are not referring here to the production of any good or service but only to a particular kind of goods: primary informational goods or, simply, to flows of digital information. Although, this is extremely important, many papers forget to point it out. All the other features of collaborative production -the non-hierarchical organization, using inputs which are not subject to proprietary exclusion, the also shared nature of the outputs- have existed from the origins of humanity and, of course, they still remain. The real novelty arises from combining some ancestral, although marginal organizational forms, with the distinctive features of informational goods.

ii) But this informational production has the Internet as an assembly line. It is not a production just relying on any digital network, but on a very specific one based on TCP/ IP, WWW, etc. In this regard, there is a requirement: the digital information flows in the collaborative production must be widely available. They must be “published”- according to OCDE (2007) - on any website; the exchange of bits should not occur trough closed.More specifically, it is necessary for collaborating individuals to have a shared platform. In addition to one or a set of websites, a number of tools of software and a base language have to be shared among the developers development of informational goods.

iii) The informational nature of production –informational goods produced via the Internet is the base of two critical organizational features of collaborative production: “modularity” and “granularity” according to Benkler (2005:112). Both are referred to breaking down the production in minimal fragments which allow the prosumer add microscopic quantities of knowledge. This, in effect, is both due to the possibilities of distribution and coordination of the Internet and the discrete nature of digital information which can be broken down to levels which are not possible with other forms of knowledge.

c) Peer to peer:

The adjective “collaborative” is, at least, vague. Actually, if there is one only point on what the whole social sciences books agree, it might be the “collaborative” nature of any human production. Now, this collaboration can be immediate or not, face to face or not, forced or not, capitalist or not, contractual or not, paid or unpaid, can include individual or collective agents, etc. The concept of “peer to peer” is more specific because it means that collaborators tend to have the same status regarding their roles in the productive process. However, this is not enough.

i) Although we refer here to organizational schemes in which, indeed, there is a trend towards horizontality, in all cases there is a certain hierarchyviii. In some cases, the structure appears as a truncated pyramid, with different kinds of administrators, moderators, editors on the top. Thus, some individuals who, based on their own merits, are recognized by the network of prosumers, are engaged in roles of coordination, selection and edition of digital information flows (Vidal, 2000: 57). In other cases, there is a genuine quasihorizontal network of collaborating producers and a single transcendent agent who centralizes a set of functions and information. This is the case of collaborative production driven by capitalist business structures, as we´ll discuss below.

ii) Moreover, an important feature of the collaborative production is that the producing peers don´t belong to the same company or institution. This means that the informational goods production takes place either out of the work time or by actors belonging to different companies or structures. Otherwise –if prosumers are paid by the same company or belong to the same state institution, for example-, we are not facing about Collaborative Production but instead a network firm, a different and well known organizational form. So, according to OECD (2007), collaborative production is usually amateur.

iii) In this sense, peers who produce, agents who collaborate, do so on their own independent choice (Benkler, 2005). In other words, in contrast to other organizational forms, in this case –whether being a capitalist production or not-, there is no entity capable of limiting the number of prosumers. Whether existing a superior instance over de peer collaboration or not, any knowledge flow which could be involved in the productive process cannot be excluded ex ante.

d) Open:

At this point we must take into account the legal characteristics of both inputs and outputs which circulate in these processes we analyze.

i) First, distinguishing inputs from outputs is important. The latter are entirely made of digital information while the formers are only partially so. A share of the inputs of collaborative production come from digital technologies -netbooks, cell phones, cameras, musical instruments, etc.-, some skills, and certain amount of energy. This is important because these resources are often not publicly owned. Instead, some of the inputs which are digital information themselves are usually free, being under Creative Commons licenses, GPL or other. However, it is not true that all these informational inputs are free. The software running Facebook or Wikipedia –in order to mention one capitalistic example and other which is not- are not available to be modified or copied. In this regard, we must be cautious when talking about productive process inputs.

ii) On the contrary, the nature of the outputs can be easily defined. Informational goods which are produced in the collaborative production are open access: they can be copied and modified without excessive restrictions. Anyway, different legal forms are involved here. In some cases, the goods are licensed under the aforementioned Creative Commons or GPL. This is the case of content from Wikipedia or Free Software. In other cases, the informational goods have ambiguous situations regarding to their intellectual property status, like Flickr photos, YouTube videos, music of My Space or Second Life objects. It should be noted that the problems of the latter situations do not arise primarily from violation of copyright of third parties but, instead, from the lack of recognition of the authorship of the prosumers." (http://cspp.oekonux.org/scientific-committee/latest-submissions/regular-issue-p2p-theory/Collaborative%20production.pdf/at_download/file)

Source

2010 submission to the CSPP journal: [http://cspp.oekonux.org/scientific-committee/latest-submissions/regular-issue-p2p-theory/Collaborative%20production.pdf/at_download/file'

Collaborative Economy

Peerproduction