As we get a chance to go back through the transcript of Sessions, we are finding a number of themes that are worth highlighting. We will try to get these thoughts up on the site over the next week or so. Our first observation is that we may need a finer grained definition of “peer production”
Since Yochai Benkler coined the term peer production in his 2003 paper Coase’s Penguin, it has been used to describe Wikipedia, Linux, peer to peer file sharing, Skype, Google’s page rank algorithm, Craigslist and many other services. As we understand this phenomenon better, it is clear that there are some important distinctions between these examples of peer production.
Tim O’Reilly’s thinking on this was formed by Dan Bricklin’s 2001 paper, the Cornucopia of the Commons:
“[Dan] pointed out [that you can either] get volunteers to [produce a good] or you can architect the system in such a way that it's produced as a byproduct of people's individual selfish activity. And I thought that was a really profound insight, because a lot of peer production examples that we see, like open source software or Wikipedia are ... people coming together [on a] network….to build something [they] consciously contribute to. Whereas Napster was a great example of a system that was built in such a way that people were just pursuing their own activities, but because of the way the system was designed, you created, as a side-effect, this… peer good”.
Yochai Benkler offered a new term, social production to encompass both forms of production.
“I've actually started to use the term social production to cover the two distinct phenomena. [For] individual action…. that gets coordinated [later] by some platform, [I use] "commons based production” (people created web sites and linked to other web sites for their own reasons, Google recognized an opportunity to exploit that effort to improve search with page rank)… “and [I use] peer production [for] the more self-conscious cooperative platforms” (Wikipedia).
Jeff Jarvis added two other examples of commons based production.
“I create my iTunes list, I'm consuming music, but I'm [also] creating a radio station. When I'm consuming peer to peer, I'm helping create the network”
But it is not clear that there are only two forms of social production. Some of the users of Craigslist, for example, are there for their own selfish purposes (to sell something) but their content is contributed to a community that is not exactly a commons. Likewise, users of Skype use the service to communicate less expensively, and do so knowing that they are contributing resources to all of the other Skype users, but Skype is also not a commons. Are these examples of yet another form of social production that we need to define?
These are not idle questions. If you plan to build a business that depends on the output of a peer network (or to invest in one) it is critical to understand how and why they are different.