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

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