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?

Joining us this week is Berkman Fellow SJ Klein.

Download slides from this week's class

Assignments

Assignment 4 is now due on April 28th, but they will be accepted if turned in today. You can submit your assignment here.

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

• Can the Internet Bring the Beginning of the End of Selfishness?

• Wikipedia, Reliability of Wikipedia

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

• Hatnote, Real Time Wikipedia Changes Map

• Congress Gets Banned From Editing Wikipedia

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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I usually prefer to attend class via the live streaming session because our conversations are brilliant and I learn a lot more, and can contribute much better in that interactive situation. The class has been brilliant.

That said, I've just had a work emergency come up which means I may not make the live portion.

I wanted to post a memory about SETI@Home... I remember joining in 1999 and had the app running on my computer, 24/7, for YEARS! I always thought it was the coolest collaborative effort utilizing desktops across the globe. I didn't care whether it found anything or not, I was always mesmerized by the data scrolling across the screen. Yes, it didn't take much to bedazzle me back then... :)

I started traveling more, and switched from a desktop to a laptop somewhere around 2002-2003 and that ended my SETI installation. I never got around to installing it again.

Also.

Speaking about innovation and technology, I think one of the biggest things to have hit the globe is 3D printing. While still a bit expensive, it still allows people to get into markets and innovate products and inventions almost immediately upon perception rather than struggling with finding someone to build their prototype, let alone finance it.

Eric Von Hippel wrote about an example of how users want to modify their own products, which was spot on. I remember watching an episode of Shark Tank where an inventor had built an electrical connector and had even used 3D modeling to produce a prototype if I recall correctly. I thought that was just about the coolest thing ever. How far technology has come that anyone, anywhere, can create products and services from nothing but their imagination and problem solving.

Another inventor created an auxilary handle for a snow shovel, again, using 3D technology to prototype it. This one I have a link for: http://blog.nextfab.com/join-the-shovelution-from-a-rapid-prototype-to-shark

We have to love the era we are in right now.

ErikaLRich (talk) 12:20, 21 April 2015 (EDT)

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Hey all, I'm screening the NYT at work this week and came across two articles that I thought would be relevant to share here:

Fighting homelessness with smartphones (a case for why technology has become a basic need): http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/upshot/fighting-homelessness-one-smartphone-at-a-time.html?abt=0002&abg=1

Europe formally challenges Google's dominance in web searches: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/business/international/european-union-google-antitrust-case.html

Enjoy!

Kelly.wilson (talk)

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Hello Kelly. I worked on a NASA project in Astrobiology and one important question came up in regards to SETI. What if extraterrestrial beings are communicatiing through another medium such as light pulses? Then SETI would be completely missing their communication. Focusing on radio waves is kind of like a shot in the dark, and it may work, it may also yield interesting results in a completely different field related to radio waves. Hromero10 (talk) 15:59, 21 April 2015 (EDT)

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Thumbs up for Zittrain Video

I usually post quite late, just before class, in case I think of something profound. Today I am posting early, firstly because experience has taught me profundity is unlikely in the hours remaining, and secondly to leave enough time that you might follow my thumbs-up for the Jonathan Zittrain Minds for Sale Video in the Optional Readings section of today’s assignment page. It is a little over 90 minutes, but I wish it were longer. It illuminates many of the questions I wrote in the margins of my notes on the other readings.

I was particularly interested in the discussion about the unusual world we are creating for ourselves as we begin to employ diverse human resources to perform tiny increments of work in return for pennies, points in a game, or nothing at all. Zittrain touches on the many imaginative ways that peer production, including the gamification of peer production, is employed. He asks whether our children will spend their leisure time making a few more dollars on their phones, rather than being a part of real/live activities. It is a fascinating discussion, very well presented.

I highly recommend venturing into this optional reading activity even if you don’t usually go there. If this subject area is at all interesting to you, Zittrain’s video is worthwhile.

Gary Brown (talk) 20:14, 20 April 2015 (EDT)

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In honor of peer production I would like to mention that I was inspired by Gary Brown’s post.

Gary, thank you so much for highlighting the “Minds for Sale” video. I agree that it does fill in the blanks and weave together themes from other reading. Zittrain offers a variety of examples of peer production in which communities work together under limited policies and control to benefit the public good. One of my favorite examples was the X Prize. I read about the X Prize in an advanced economics course at Pepperdine while working towards my MBA. Just like in Hergeaux’s Wikipedia experiment, or “Public Goods Game” individuals participating in the X Prize may forego their own financial gains in the event that their social image may be boosted. We can see also, just like in Creative Commons, individuals participating in the X Prize give up “right, title, and interest” to their work. Yet the potential benefit to both an individual company in charge of that specific X Prize, and public at large, can be monumental.

Batjarks (talk) 14:18, 21 April 2015 (EDT)

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While reading Eric Von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation, particularly the passage about windsurfing, I was reminded of the first in-depth article I read about Twitter. I started my own account in January of 2009, but I rarely used it until that summer when I read an in-depth article about it in Time magazine. The article described how Twitter users – not the software team – developed the concept of the hashtag, as well as trending topics. Since that time, these innovations have more or less come to define Twitter as we know it. I specifically remember a quote likening Twitter’s use innovation to a group of people buying a toaster and transforming it into a microwave. This article was directly responsible for my increased usage of Twitter. At a time when Facebook was making sweeping changes to its platform, often to the dismay of its users, the idea of Twitter’s user-based innovation felt refreshing, democratic, and empowering.

What I was feeling is similar to what Yochai Benkler described about Wikipedia: that it has given us "a way of looking at the world around us and seeing the possibility of effective human cooperation, on really complex, large projects, without relying on either market or government processes” (of course, Twitter itself relies on the market, but its users do not necessarily). I was also struck by James Surowiecki’s arguments for the wisdom of crowds. I often fall into a trap of thinking that large groups succumb to the lowest common denominator or develop a mob mentality. However, the way Twitter users make use of hashtags should constantly be reminding me of the opposite. Consistently over the past several years, users have redefined media narratives that have traditionally excluded certain voices. For example, the #yesallwomen and #blacklivesmatter hashtags have given voices to women and African Americans and have launched conversations around gender and race in society in productive ways. It seems like I constantly hear about how the Internet makes us secluded, narcissistic, and vapid, so it was encouraging to read about the ways large numbers of users contribute to the public good through peer production.

Beccalew (talk) 12:05, 21 April 2015 (EDT)

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While learning about peer production on the internet, twitter came to mind, but also you tube, specifically in regards to the latest cases of police brutality that have been posted on line through You Tube, Instagram and other outlets. Along with the hashtag #blacklives matter, videos of police brutality have been crowd sourced in a non coordinated fashion by individuals and activists groups for many years now, and after all the video-body of evidence has been brought out in the open, a national conversation has begun about police and community relations, as well as racial profiling, the use of force and in general the american criminal justice system.

This is no small feat. No political organization could craft a message like this, no individual group could do it, no individual could ever do this on his own because the scope and complexity of the problem is beyond any one group or person to articulate, even less beginning a plan of action. And yet, comments from people who were not aware of this problem run the gamut of 'this country is becoming a police state' to 'I never thought it was this bad'. In reality, the problem has existed for the past 20-30 years, its just that now technology (video and phone cameras, plus access to the web)has made the evidence more visible to the general population. Let's not forget Rodney King's arrest was videotaped by somebody who happened to have one of those clunky video cameras the size of a briefcase, and the video went viral through the formal media outlets.

This is a form of spontaneous crowd sourcing through an informal (generic) platform and the results have been very specific and focused on a particular problem. Hromero10 (talk) 15:02, 21 April 2015 (EDT)

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Motivations Behind Peer Productions? – Still Fundamentally Selfish

While the idea that the Internet will be—and has proven be—the great floodgate opener of magnanimity, global and community cooperation, is a pleasant one, and one that is not wrong, it still seems misguided to say that cooperation is not selfishly motivated – even, perhaps especially, for the Internet. What Benckler’s The Penguin and the Leviathan (Frick’s Atlantic article) calls the “end of selfishness” is a well-meaning idea that holds water but only to an extent. There is still an argument to be made that community cooperation is at its core, a selfish endeavor and is simply part of human nature. If we help it is either to make ourselves feel better about ourselves or to ease our current and future consciences, or simply to know that we have spent our time well on an effort we deem worthy. Selfishness has its good masks and its bad masks. And the mistake is to say that the Internet, from peer produced efforts, to creative commons, to free software, to Wikipedia, simply because it seems to not support the bad kind of selfishness (on the whole) doesn’t mean it is devoid of the positive selfishness. One might even argue that all this cooperation is still a mask of the most mass positive selfishness humanity has ever experienced. And we still have the Internet to thank.

From what we can gather in Frick’s article, Benckler explores why people take the time and effort to, without monetary gain or recognition even, invest in such activities such as Wikipedia. Benckler explores the many reasons why it may be that we sit down before a screen with seemingly altruistic efforts at contributing to the global pool of knowledge and enlightenment.

The positive selfishness argument can easily make a case that contributing to Wikipedia is an expression of our desire to a) confirm our understanding of a topic, or b) learn more about a topic ourselves.

Take another peer produced community, like, say, a guitar chord community; a place where guitarists will go online and tabulate popular songs for the rest of the community – motivations I think, are largely driven by users who wanted to learn a song, and by participating in a forum like UltimateGuitar.com, they force themselves to not only learn the song they aimed for, but they also get feedback from other users. So these users are not altruistically motivated to contribute to the pool of lost guitarists. They are self motivated – in other words, goodly selfish.

Drawing from my own experience in this class through our assignment editing Wikipedia pages -- something I was never interested in doing before and never understood why friends were so excited about doing it… it wasn’t until I started editing my article that I understood why it was actually FUN: I had chosen a topic I was interested in, but not necessarily an expert in – and even when I KNEW the information I was inputting into the article, I had to find reliable sources to back up my claims.

In the process I learned more about the topic. I found myself enjoying the fact that I was:

1) Confirming knowledge previously held, but most importantly,

2) Furthering knowledge: Learning myself facts and details I didn’t previously know. The last consideration was merely an endorphinesque feeling one gets after an intense run:

3) I was helping contribute to a worldwide web of knowledge about my topic.

While this third consideration was an important one in my experience with the Wikipedia editing assignment, I certainly order it as THIRD behind the first two motivations for contributing anonymously and without compensation.

I would be curious to read Benckler’s The Penguin and the Leviathan – but this week’s readings clarified ideas about Peer Produced motivations for me. Fundamentally, we are still selfishly motivated; it’s just a question of from what side of the tree we are being driven; the good side or the bad side.

Chanel Rion (talk) 15:37, 21 April 2015 (EDT)

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The questions raised by Jonathan Zittrain in iLaw 2011: “Minds For Sale” and in in their lectures, like who is standing behind a common achievement, the copyright issues, are particularly interesting especially when adding up Internet. As the digital world is giving almost unlimited possibilities for anonymity a group work done online is making us ask ourselves to whom the achievements should be attributed but also who should be blamed in case of liability engaged?

James Surowiecki tell us about experiments leading to the conclusion that crowd’s results in completing a task are undeniably better than the results of the cleverest individuals, meaning that the majority is always right. The philosophy of this postulate has been largely discussed both defended and denied during the years and it is out of the scope of today’s reading to discuss it but what is important is to make a difference between “crowd” and “team”. In the case of the DARPA project balloons challenge, the quest was done by team of people having similar way of thinking, coming from the same educational background , trained to think and seek solutions using similar methods and technics. When we talk about randomly assembled individuals acting without having the same training to deal with certain situation we could easily come across well-intentioned but chaotic results. Wikipedia project which has been mentioned several times is a great example of group work but also shows that such kind of activity inevitably need to be organised if not centralised and all those efforts should be supervised. In the article about Wikipedia’s reliability the authors have quoted the result of an IBM research in 2003 which found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly—so quickly that most users will never see its effects" and concluded that Wikipedia had "surprisingly effective self-healing capabilities".

There are areas like education and information, in which the more we get the better and even in case of misleading information, sources could be cross checked and conclusions could be grounded differently. On the other hand there are fields in which using the potential of the crowdsourcing to solve a problem could bring more problems than solutions and than the main issue of the anonymity in such will be standing again. (Gia (talk))

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The best companies often work closely with their customers to uncover needs and wants that can be translated into new or improved product or service offerings. Companies using customer needs and preferences to modify current products into new and improved products and services; and how they are using social media for product innovation. Those using social media for product innovation are gaining business benefits, including more (and better) new product ideas or requirements, faster time to market, faster product adoption, lower product costs, and lower product development costs. According to Kenley and Poston (2015), more than 50% of the companies they surveyed were piloting their social media product innovations to some varying degrees. This has created product improvements, which creates increased market share and product revenue. Here is a link to their article: http://kalypso.com/downloads/insights/Kalypso_Social_Media_and_Product_Innovation_1.pdf.

Reading Von Hippel’s article really illumined the development of products and services over time. Personally, I have seen how many of my peers’ feedback (quite a few engineers) have been incorporated into product development, by merely providing feedback on the product failure and a solution on improving the product. Additionally, it is fascinating how the ability to innovate has become so inexpensive that individuals are filling a product need with very little training. If you look at the current market for phone applications, quite a number are being developed by laypersons. The tools for crafting high-quality developments are now so economical and universally accessible that individuals can innovate for themselves. Here is a great article on how a 12 year old learning to code and developing 5 apps: http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/14/this-12-year-old-kid-learned-to-code-on-codecademy-built-5-apps-and-is-speaking-at-sxsw/

Here is an interesting article writing about Uber and Airbnb as examples peer production (though not technologically) https://theumlaut.com/2014/04/09/how-uber-and-airbnb-resurrect-dead-capital/

Tasha (talk) 15:47, 21 April 2015 (EDT)

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The peer production’s existence would not appear without the participation and acceptance of the people around them. This brings out the best in people. This in fact would contribute to the final product. Yet I do agree with Zuckerman (ref 1), that it could be a two edged sword. To guess a jar of beans, if we are all equally likely to guess it, then the higher the sample, the more likely the mean is close to the actual number. Yet it was also true for the reverse if the likelihood was less than 50%. So that gives the quick summary of the advantages and disadvantages of peer production. It could yield great production due to the contribution of everyone, but it could also encounter problems that makes things worse.

Of course, when we focus on the optimistic; we could see that peer production does have its merits when done right. With peer production, a permission would not be required. More and more are accepting of it, such as the use of open source software that increases more collaboration on the internet. And as the video tells us (ref 2), after 5 years of Wikipedia’s creation, the accuracy of Britannia and Wikipedia were both considered “bad”; so in a way they were of the same level. Why then should peer production be excluded out then? It brings speedy information out which would be beneficial to news channels; such as obtaining photos, etc. I also like the idea of peer production for collaborations between teachers. I can’t exactly see what kind of strategies would be used; but I do see the value in this.

I’d like to draw upon the following quote.

“Social sharing and exchange emerge as a major modality of economic production” – Ref 2

I believe this is an important part of the video. Social sharing would become a big part of economic production. This also brings us to wonder what kind of regime are we under. This does sound a little… socialism in a way. Social sharing? Providing a little input for the common goal of something? Yet aren’t we under a capitalistic structure? Or has this shaped to be a hybrid of some sort. The internet may provide the type of regime we may eventually see in the future. The purpose of social sharing, peer production has been expressed quite strongly. It’s benefits and advantages could be seen too. If it’s good enough for BBC, then it must have it’s value somewhere.

Since I’m in finance, I’d like to talk about the collective evaluation of prices. As Hayek believes, it is the collective market’s participants that would derive in a just price for a product, it should also be the case for temperature, price of items, etc. I do understand and agree with Hayek that the market’s way of deriving in the correct price is always right. Afterall, the collective thoughts of millions must beat that of a few smart men. Though I do see the vulnerabilities of this. The advantages of this would only lie in things that could be quantified. Prices, weight, temperature, etc. It is, in my opinion, extremely faulty when dealing with ideas, ideals, thoughts, etc. Those issues cannot result in a mass deliberation that brings us closer to choosing the right regime, or some sort of universal justice we’ll all agree upon. In this sense, the greatest benefit of peer production would be formed on issues that could be quantified. Things that could not be quantified could achieve well if it were for a collective goal of producing something. If it were for some sort of deliberation, it would be extremely hard; and quite plausibly make us get further from the truth.

If we were to look at current examples on the internet that was a form of peer production, I think we need not look further than Twitter. It is fast, efficient, and quickly sharable of information. Retweets also help make a tweet more important to be viewed by the masses. Though as I mentioned above, these could have draw backs as well. If a piece of news is faulty, that would become viral in minutes, but costly the victim quite a bit of embarrassment. This power of peer production has it’s advantages and disadvantages, but as of now, I do not believe there is any way to control this. I think I am more interested in looking at peer production more of a regime form… sort of a light rhyme to socialism if you may.

References:

Ref 1 - http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2006/11/30/cass-sunsteins-infotopia/

Ref 2 - http://video.mit.edu/watch/news-information-and-the-wealth-of-networks-9187/

Ref 3 - http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/excerpt.html

Caelum (talk) 15:53, 21 April 2015 (EDT)