Light beats heavy. Open beats closed. Free beats paid. Good beats evil.

- Umair Haque [1]

Our P2P Business Network

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Tia Carr	Sam Rose	Georg Pleger	Matt Cooperrider	Marcin Jakubowski	Michel Bauwens
tiacarrwilliams@gmail.com	samuel dot rose at gmail dot com	georg at pleger dot at	mattcooperrider at gmail dot com	joseph dot dolittle at gmail dot com	michelsub2004 at gmail dot com

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Introduction and Visualization

This section collates material related to peer production, P2P Business developments, and P2P Economics issues.

Recommended reading:

1. Michel Bauwens: An Introduction to Open Business Models. OSBR, April 2008

Also:

1. How Low Participation Costs make Peer Production Inevitable
2. Markets are inefficient for non-rival goods. Josh Farley
3. In peer production, the interests of capitalists and entrepreneurs are no longer aligned
4. Can peer production make washing machines?. Graham Seaman.

Please note that the issue of physical peer production or "open design communities for physical production) is monitored separately in this section

Visualization

larger version

A map with a conceptual overview of the peer to peer business space. Every concept in the map is searchable via our wiki search box on the upper left.

Recommended Internal Entries

Check the following priority entries:

1. Vision Statement
   1. Michel Bauwens on the Underlying P2P Values: Video
2. From consumption to produsage
   • Produserism ; Mass Amateurization ; Pro-Am Revolution
   • Consumer-Generated Media ; Customer-centric Brands ; Consumer-Fortified Media
   • User-Generated Ecosystem ; User-Capitalized Networks
   1. The new partnership economy
      1. Peer Production; Direct Economy; Production without Manufacturer; Circulation of the Common
      2. Co-Creation ; Co-Design ; Co-production ; Citizen Product Design ; Crowdsourced Design
      3. Crowdsourcing ; Crowdfunding ; Crowdpricing
   2. Affinity Markets and Social Commerce
      1. Affinity Investing  ; Affinity Markets ; Recognition Markets
      2. Community Supported Manufacturing ; Community Trading Software ; Community Wealth Building
      3. Long Tail ; Social Commerce
   3. New marketing practices
      1. Group Buying ; Group Purchasing
      2. User-created Advertizing ; User-driven Advertizing ; Citizen Marketers ; Crowdsourced Advertising
   4. New Economic Logics
      1. Attention Economy ; Economics of Attention; Intention Economy ; Pull Economies
      2. Conversation Economy ; Markets as Conversations
      3. Ethical Economy ; Bottom of the Pyramid ; Blended Value; Good Capital, Inclusive Capitalism
      4. Fair Trade ; Social Entrepreneurship
      5. Markets without Capitalism ; Natural Capitalism ; Steady State Economy
      6. Economics of Sharing; Altruistic Economics ; Cooperative Economics, Collaboration Theory , Collaborate to Compete
      7. Quarternary Economics; Adventure Economy ; Process Economy
3. New coopetitive practices
   • Asymmetric Competition; Edge Competencies ;
   • User-centered Innovation ; User Innovation Theory ; Open Innovation ; Diffuse Innovation ; Lead Users
   • For Benefit; Benefit Sharing ; Revenue Sharing ; Rewards for Contributions ; Crowding Out
4. New distributed infrastructures
   • Customer-Controlled Networks ; Customer-build network infrastructures
   • Co-Working Infrastructure ; Hacker Ethic
   • P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects ; Peer to Peer Exchanges
   • Credit Commons, Mutual Credit, LETS, Open Money ; P2P Lending ; Social Lending
   1. Physical P2P Production
      1. Open Design ; Open Peer to Peer Design, Open Hardware ; Free Hardware Design ; Product Hacking
      2. Desktop Manufacturing ; Personal Fabricators ; Multiple-Purpose Production Technology
      3. Rapid Manufacturing ; Rapid Prototyping ; Rapid Tooling
5. New institutional formats
   • Peer Property ; Commons; Trusts ; Citizen Ownership
   • Open Business; Open Capital ; Open Company Models ; Open Enterprise, Capital Commons Trusts ; Open Book Management
   1. New business models
      1. Open Music Business Models; Open Film Business Models; Free Software Business Models; Open Source Business Models ; Open Source Commercialization
   2. The new capitalism
      1. Hacker Class, Netarchical Capitalism ; P2P Capitalism ; Cooperative Capitalism ; Peer Production Entrepreneurs

Short Citations

= "Our First Curve economy is dominated by hierarchical organizations focused on managing costs. In the Second Curve economy, business models focus on creating networks and value webs." [2]

• When costs of participation are low enough, any motivation may be sufficient to lead to a contribution.- Michael Feldstein [3]
• Peer production is viable when: 1. capital costs (needed for production) fall far enough and 2. coordination costs fall far enough. Cheap computing and communication reduce both of these exponentially, so peer production becomes inevitable. - Anomalous Presumption [4]
• Working together as equals. Profiting from each others success. These two ideas represent a surprisingly radical redefinition of work. - Bernie DeKoven [5]
• We genuinely believe that radical sharing is a win-win for everyone. Expanding markets create new opportunities. - Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems [6]
• The best people (to solve any given problem) don't work for your organization. A corollary to this: if you don't have the best people working for you, you will fail. Use transparency and the marketplace to find the best people located outside your organization. - John Robb [7]
• Post-industrial modernization brings a fundamental shift in economic strategies, from maximizing material standards of living to maximizing well-being through life style changes. The "quality of experience" replaces the quantity of commodoties, as the prime criterion for making a good living - Alan Moore [8]
• The Implicit Goal of Attention Economy is: to tightly intertwine everyone at the level of mind. But that involves individuals seeking, obtaining and/or paying attention. - Michael Goldhaber [9]
• the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits. - Kevin Kelly [10]
• The peer producers are their own consumers. They get a better product by tapping into the knowledge pool. And they get a product that exactly fits their needs because they help design it. - Eric Schonfeld [11]
• In this new world, if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. And those companies which seek to prohibit the manipulation and circulation of their content will find themselves cut off from the mechanisms which generate value in this new media economy. - Henry Jenkins [12]

Long Citations

Competing 'on top' of the Commons

"One of the best ways to stimulate competition, innovation and lower prices is for participants in a market to honor the commons (a shared pool of resources, a minimal set of safety or performance standards) and then to compete "on top" of the commons. Instead of being able to reap easy profits from monopoly control over something everyone needs -- say, a computer operating system like Windows -- a company must work harder to "add value" in more specialized ways." (http://onthecommons.org/node/1196)

- David Bollier

The Sharing Economy should be distinguished from the Monetary Economy

"... the quest for self-determination and meaningful and memorable experiences ultimately will hinge on people's understanding that they are not merely consuming a product, but that they are actually participating in a meaningful social process not guided by an extrinsic logic (profit), something that rather has intrinsic, or 'sovereign' value. I don't believe that these two can be fused into one

- Eric Kluitenberg, iDC archive [13]

Market Logic vs. Network Logic

"The philosophy that undergirds exchange also contrasts sharply across forms. In markets the standard strategy is to drive the hardest possible bargain in the immediate exchange. In networks, the preferred option is often one of creating indebtedness and reliance over the long haul. Each approach thus devalues the other: prosperous market traders would be viewed as petty and untrustworthy shysters in networks, while successful participants in networks who carried those practices into competitive markets would be viewed as foolish and naive... In a market context, it is clear to everyone concerned when a debt has been discharged, but such matters and not nearly as obvious in networks."

- Walter Powell - "Niether Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization" 1990

Markets without Money

"Money is a very important and useful medium of exchange for high-value, tangible products. For small-value, intangible products, the costs tend to exceed the value of the transactions—especially when you add in the overhead associated with making payments at a distance. Fortunately, human beings are clever. We’ve begun to find a variety of substitutes for money that work better."

- Tim Lee [14]

Social Commerce and the Intention Economy

"only 13% of consumers say they buy products because of their ads. Contrast that to 60% of small business owners in North America that say they use peer recommendations to make their buying decisions and over 70% of 18-35 year olds who report the same for their media purchases."

- Tara Hunt [15]

Monetization vs. Community value creation

"When you try and "monetize your users", you accept the almost obscene assumption that people are meant to be pimped out, sold to the highest bidder, resources to be slashed, burned, and exploited. But that's not how the edgeconomy works. Businesses need what connected consumers have to give more than connected consumers need what businesses have to sell.

Let's put that a little more formally. Monetization is ugly because it blinds us to the truth that value must flow in many directions. That's the essence of edge strategy, in fact."

- Umair Haque [16]

Key Resources

Key Books

1. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom - by Yochai Benkler
2. Democratizing Innovation - by Eric Von Hippel
3. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything - by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams
4. We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business - by Barry Libert, Jon Spector, Don Tapscott (foreword)

Key External Articles

1. Vision Statement
   1. The Not An Employee Manifesto
2. On the Economics of the Commons
   1. Circulation of the Common. Nick Dyer-Whiteford.
   2. Common Rights vs Collective Rights is an essay by Dan Sullivan in which he also explains the difference between Common Property and collective property.
   3. Can peer production make washing machines?. By Graham Seaman.
   4. Contrasting Firm Strategies for Open Standards, Open Source and Open Innovation. by Joel West. Excellent intro to the economic realities limiting true openness.
3. On Information Economics
   1. JP Barlow, “The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age”, Wired 2.03 (March 1994)
   2. E Dyson , “Intellectual Value”, Wired 3.07 (July 1995)
   3. K Kelly, “The Economics of Ideas”, Wired 4.06 (June 1996)
4. On Open Source economics
   1. The economics of open source
   2. Open source as user innovation – von Hippel
   3. Analysis of OS Business models
   4. Allocation of resources in OS mode
   5. Open source outside software – Clay Shirky
5. On the Economics of Participation
   1. Ten Principles for an Ethical Blogger Approach For Marketers
   2. Which tools to use for collaboration in business? - recommended overview table.
   3. The Open Business Guide
6. Miscellaneous
   1. List of Social Media managers in US businesses

Key Podcasts

• Chris Anderson on the Long Tail
• Clayton Christensen on Open Source and Innovation in Business
• Doc Searls on Self-Forming Markets
• Doc Searls on the Intention Economy
• Geoffrey Moore on Open Source and Capitalism
• Jonathan Schwartz on the Age of Participation
• Michael Goldhaber on the Attention Economy
• Yochai Benkler on the Wealth of Networks

Key Tags

P2P-Advertising; Crowdsourcing; Desktop Manufacturing; Distributed Capitalism; Innovation; Netarchical Capitalism; Open Source Commercialization; P2P Banking; P2P Business Developments; P2P Capitalism; P2P Economics; P2P Exchanges; P2P Management Developments; P2P-Money; P2P-Production; P2P-Property; Revenue Sharing; Social Commerce

External Sources

Selected Wikipedia entries

• Altruistic Economics
• Genuine Progress Indicator
• Gross National Happiness
• Herman Daly
• Post Autistic Economics
• Uneconomic Growth
• Commons-based Peer Production
• Gift Economy
• Public Domain
• Free Content
• Free software
• Open Source
• Long Tail
• Reputation

The P2P Business Encyclopedia