Peer Production: Development from the Edges and from the Crowd

March 25

Beyond merely providing a forum for political activism, scholars are increasingly aware of the benefits the Internet provides as a mode of production. How can the Internet help us make things together? How much hierarchy and control is needed to produce? How good is the material that peer production creates? And finally, what are the risks to producers (and society) inherent to peer production?

Assignments

The deadline for Assignment 3 has moved from March 25th to April 1st. All other deadlines will not change.

Readings

Development from the edges

• Eric Von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Chapter 1, focus on pages 1-3 and 13-15, skim rest)

Development as a crowd

• Jerome Hergeaux, Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy: Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia (video, watch from beginning to 47:50)

• Yochai Benkler, News, Information and the Wealth of Networks (video, watch from 8:32 to 26:07)

• if you’re not familiar, you may want to spend a little time looking at Wikipedia’s entry on Seti@home.

• John Tang et al, Reflecting on the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge (Communications of the ACM)

Crowd intelligence

• James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (read excerpt)

• Ethan Zuckerman, Review of Cass Sunstein’s “Infotopia”

Optional Readings

• Wikipedia, Reliability of Wikipedia

• Jonathan Zittrain, Minds for Sale (video, watch all)

• Hatnote, Real Time Wikipedia Changes Map

Class Discussion

Please remember to sign your postings by adding four tildes (~~~~) to the end of your contribution. This will automatically add your username and the date/time of your post, like so: Andy 15:12, 7 November 2013 (EST)

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COMMENTS ON "Jerome Hergeaux, Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy: Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia"

Coming from an operations research background, I find the application of game theoretic approaches to this project rather interesting. However, there are other aspects which were not taken into account. For example, the utility of social recognition derived by contributors to Wikipedia can be obtained at significantly reduced cost and risk compared to other options like authoring a book or publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. Furthermore, the results are immediate so the perceived utility is also immediate.

Ichua 08:40, 25 March 2014 (EDT)

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QUALITY OF CONTENT FROM PEER PRODUCTION IN WIKIPEDIA

Because Wikipedia content lacks originality and are mostly copied from other sources, I beg to differ on the usefulness of mentioning contributions to Wikipedia in one's resume. Real scholars would rather contribute to peer-reviewed journals where the benefits are far greater, including promotion and salary increase if working in an academic institution. So while Wikipedia content may be useful to the general public, the quality of the content may not be of high academic value.

Ichua 09:17, 25 March 2014 (EDT)

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I think that one of the great examples of Democratizing Innovation are games... A number of highly successful games have been initially created as mods developed by gamers, and later turned into commercial products by the companies whose games were built upon... Some examples off the top of my head include many Half Life/Source engine based multiplayer games, DotA - originally based on Warcraft III, or, outside of video games, the many unofficial rulebooks, expansions and modifications of Dungeons & Dragons or some of the Wizards of the Coast's collectible card games. --Seifip 10:24, 25 March 2014 (EDT)