Peer Production

April 21

Although the point may seem obvious now, one of the Internet’s most powerful attributes is how it can facilitate the social production of information or computing. From the earliest experiments with dividing memory-intensive tasks amongst different computers, to modern efforts to crowdsource solutions to challenging or urgent problems, peer production is a major benefit from our networked world. And it raises some interesting questions of both Internet control and production theory: How much hierarchy and control is needed to produce? How good is the material that peer production creates? Are there types of things that should not be produced by the crowd? What are the risks to producers and society inherent to peer production?

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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