3. Peer Production and Sharing
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Content
Summary
It is not intuitive that thousands of volunteers could beat big companies. Yet they do.
Coase argues that corporations exist because the transaction costs of using the market are too high. Yet GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl and others use neither markets nor hierarchies.
I call this commons-based peer production. Commons (as opposed to property) because no one person controls how the resource is used, they are either open to the public or a defined group. Peer production because it is done through self-selected, decentralized individual action.
Examples: Free software, NASA Clickworkers, Wikipedia, Second Life.
Relevance and accredditation technology can ensure the results are good: Open Directory Project, Slashdot (karma).
Distribution tech too: Project Gutenberg.
Sharing tech: SETI@Home, Napster
Sources
Sources cited in the chapter
Other relevant readings
Case Studies
Supporting examples
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Could be considered micro-outsourcing, allows API access to human effort. Also see Turkwatch for an overview of recent MTurk projects
Counter-examples
Indeterminate Examples (in progress)
- Mycroft
- UCB iSchool research project, a generalization of ClickWorkers by utilizing a few seconds of web surfer's abilities to collaboratively solve large problems, without leaving the page. Currently focusing on Wikipedia image tagging and Project Gutenberg.