A new mode of production has emerged in the areas of software and content production. This mode, which is based on sharing and cooperation, has spawned whole mature operating systems such as GNU/Linux as well as innumerable other free software applications; giant knowledge bases such as the Wikipedia; a large free culture movement; and a new, wholly decentralized medium for spreading, analyzing and discussing news and knowledge, the so-called blogosphere.

So far, this new mode of production--peer production--has been limited to certain niches of production, such as information goods. This book discusses whether this limitation is necessary or whether the potential of peer production extends farther. In other words: Is a society possible in which peer production is the primary mode of production? If so, how could such a society be organized?

Is a society possible where production is driven by demand and not by profit? Where there is no need to sell anything and hence no unemployment? Where competition is more a game than a struggle for survival? Where there is no distinction between people with capital and those without? A society where it would be silly to keep your ideas and knowledge secret instead of sharing them; and where scarcity is no longer a precondition of economic success, but a problem to be worked around?

It is, and this book describes how.

About the Author
Dr. Christian Siefkes is a co-founder of the German-language Freie-Gesellschaft-Wiki and Keimform-Blog, a wiki and a blog dedicated to some of the questions investigated in this text.

His prior involvements with the free software community include translations for the GNU Project and contributions to the spam filtering community which influenced free spam filters such as CRM114 and OSBF-Lua. Christian Siefkes holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, and is currently working as a software engineer and text mining expert.

Visit From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World Download Page

Paperback: 156 pages
Author: Dr. Christian Siefkes
Publisher: Siefkes-Verlag (September 20, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3940736007
ISBN-13: 978-3940736000

Download From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World

PDF format, 985KB, 155Pages.

Contents
1 Introduction 9
2 Elements of Peer Production 13
2.1 Commons, Sharing, and Control over the Means of Production . .. . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Free Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.3 From Status to Reputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3 Problems to Solve for Generalization 17
3.1 How to Coordinate the Producer Side with the Consumer Side? . .  . . 17
3.2 How to Allocate Limited Resources and Goods? 19
4 Organizing Shared Production 21
4.1 How to Find Others for Cooperation . . . . . . . 21
4.2 How to Obtain Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.3 How to Ensure That Tasks Are Handled . . . . . 25
4.4 How to Assign Results of a Project . . . . . . . . 31
5 Fitting It All Together: A Peer Economy 41
5.1 Society as a Big Project or a Multitude of Projects 41
5.2 Sharing Effort Between Projects: Distribution Pools 42
5.3 Organizing Infrastructure and Public Services: Local Associations . . . 46
5.4 Coordinating Production: Prosumer Associations 54
5.5 Resource Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
5.6 Decision Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
6 Comparison with Other Modes of Production 77
6.1 Differences from a Market Economy . . . . . . . 77
6.2 Differences from a Planned Economy . . . . . . 88
7 Aspects of Life in a Peer Economy 91
7.1 Forms of Democratic Decision Making in Local Associations . .. . . 91
7.2 Stakeholder Involvement and Conflict Resolution 95
7.3 Education and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
7.4 Creative Works and Other Freely Sharable Goods101
7.5 Styles of Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
8 Concerns 109
8.1 How to Handle Contributions? . . . . . . . . . . 109
8.2 How to Handle Effort? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
8.3 What About Migration? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
8.4 Won’t There Be Need for Further Laws and Standards?  . . . . 124
8.5 Won’t Such a Society Revert to a Market Economy?126
8.6 Aren’t There Many Variants to the Proposed Model? . .  . . . . 128
9 Conclusion: The Development of a Peer Economy 131
Bibliography 137
A Mathematical Details of the Auctioning Models 143
A.1 Task Auctioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
A.2 Product Auctioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
A.3 Resource Auctioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
A.4 Virtual Effort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

Introduction
A new mode of production has emerged in the areas of software and content production during the last decades. This mode, which is based on sharing and cooperation, has spawned whole mature operating systems such as GNU/Linux and various BSD systems as well as innumerable other free software applications, some of which form the backbones of the Internet or the core of various enterprises; giant knowledge bases such as the Wikipedia; a large free culture movement often based on Creative Commons licenses; and a new, wholly decentralized medium for spreading, analyzing and discussing news and knowledge, the so-called blogosphere; among others.

Yochai Benkler has coined the term peer production to describe this collaborative and open mode of production which has become typical for the Internet in recent years (Benkler, 2002; 2006). Benkler makes it clear that peer production (or its generalization, social production) is a third mode of production that is fundamentally different from both market-based production and firm production. Market systems are based on equivalent exchange (with or sometimes without money), while firms (and also the former “socialist” planned economies such as the Soviet Union) rely on hierarchies and organized planning to distribute tasks and resources. ...

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