Commons-oriented Peer Production in Knowledge and Software

draft page

http://delicious.com/vapeug/p2pfoundation

Definition

Peer to peer is a form of relationality between human beings whereby people can connect to each other without permission, and aggegrate around the creation of common value. In human anthropology, and in particular according to the relational grammar of Alan Page Fiske, it is considered one of the four basic human ways to relate to each other. In peer to peer, individuals 'exchange' with a totality, without direct reciprocation. Though peer to peer has been documented across all cultures and in each stage of human evolution, the available of a global peer to peer infrastructure of communication and cooperation, has greatly extented its scope and scale, from the hyperlocal to the global. Linked to this capacity of global cooperation around shared objects of creation is the concept and practice of a commons. A commons is a shared resource that is either inherited from nature (and Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate in economics, has documented the rationale and governance of such natural resource commons), or created by human beings, either in the 'immaterial fields' of knowledge and culture (this includes free and open source software and shared designs), or by holding productive human capital (machinery and the means of production) in common stock.

The increased ability to generate peer to peer relationships has led to the emergence of what prof. Yochai Benkler calls 'commons-based peer production', in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, largely without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_production)

This definition needs to be amended however:

- communities of contributors need not be large, there are many small-scale projects

- the lack of financial compensation is not vital, there are now many commons with strong corporate participation in the majority of commons-contributors are employees of firms.

It is useful to break down the process of peer production in three phases:

- an input fase, where contributors can freely contribute to a common resource by either creating or using freely available raw material

- a process phase, which to the degree that the contributions are done by volunteers, need to be participatory, and whereby even corporate contributors need to adopt to a substantial degree to the rules and norms of the peer producing communities

- an output phase, whereby the product of the common activity, i.e. the commons of knowledge, software or design, is protected not from private use but from exclusive private appropriation.

Hence, peer production is a process of production whereby contributors can freely contribute to a common resource that will be available to all.

Within pure play peer production, resources are not allocated either through a market (supply and demand dynamics regulated through pricing), nor through the centralized decisions of a firm, but through the dynamic of social relationships themselves.

However, in reality, peer production exists in adaptation to the existing market and institutional structures, and firms and markets do have a role, which we will explicit later on.

An interesting analogy here is to consider that the horizontalisation of human productive relationships in peer production, when confronted with the more 'vertical' (centralized, hierarchical) players of the market economy, will lead to a wide variety of diagonal adaptations.

For example, here is a 'ladder of participation' which highlights possible combinations between peer production communities and corporations, framed around a polarity of influence between both.

LADDER OF PARTICIPATION HERE