Peer Production

Context:

‘There are no non-commercial automobile manufacturers.  There are no volunteer steel foundries.’  Yocahi Benkler, 2006. [10]
The fact that people come together to produce successful, high-quality information goods in a voluntary way and without financial reward is counterintuitive.  Why does it happen?  Can we predict when people will share information using the wiki and when they will not?

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Peer production is a method of producing goods and services which turns many aspects of commercial and socially funded projects on their head.  Instead of an individual or team being paid to create something, peer production uses the creative energy of large numbers of people who work without any financial reward.  In place of central management, the work is co-ordinated across the Internet in a collaborative way with only a minimal set of rules.  Rather than working to a deliberate, detailed plan, projects are shaped through an informal, emergent consensus.  In place of intellectual copyright protection, the product is often freely available as an open source, or commons-based product, using ‘copyleft’ arrangements, which allow users to share, remix and reuse the material legally; for example, the licence which is applied to this report. 

Peer production has been used recently to produce a range of successful, high quality information goods and services: Slashdot is an online news publishing system; Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopaedia; Linux is an open-source, operating system for computers; Skype is a programme that allows people to make free telephone calls over the Internet by using idle computer power and Internet connections; Google uses a page ranking algorithm which combines the judgments of millions of Web page creators to determine the most relevant search results; and Lego has created a range of virtual products which users can download and assemble, before ordering their finished design as a set of real parts. 

Peer production is not a new phenomenon – the Oxford English Dictionary was compiled in a similar way by volunteers using quotation slips which were sent through the post.  However, Internet-based technology has made peer production a more viable economic model.  Peer production is well suited to creating and sharing knowledge within the academic community – after all, academics willingly provide articles without charge to publishing companies in exchange for peer recognition.  It is also suited to practitioners, who can share the benefits of creating and sharing knowledge with their peers for a minimal investment.  Nevertheless, peer production works better in some situations than others, and according to Dan Tapscott [1], peering works best when the following conditions are present:

• The object of production is information or ideas, which keeps the cost of participation low for contributors
• Tasks can be chunked into small pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments, independently of other producers
• The cost of integrating those pieces into a finished end product, including the leadership and quality control mechanisms must be low

Therefore:

Reduce the cost and effort needed to contribute to the wiki and increase the rewards of participation in order to make the process viable.

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One of the principal problems with peer production is the ‘free-rider problem’ which refers to a situation where some individuals make use of a common resource but fail to make a fair contribution towards its cost – refer pattern Unequal Participation.