The Handbook of Peer Production

Christian Pentzold

The regulation of peer‐production projects is achieved by the users themselves. These forms of self‐organization and self‐management depend on shared social norms and have generated, in turn, sets of rules. Some of them characterize the larger population of peer‐production projects; others seem to be an attribute of particular projects. The chapter provides an overview and comparison of peer production’s signature norms and rules, it traces their origins and describes their implications for collaboration and editorial work.

Michael Stevenson

How can we make sense of cultures of peer production, which exist in diverse national, cultural, and language contexts, span several industries and domains, and comprise a range of different organizational structures? To set the groundwork for such an understanding, this chapter argues that it is necessary to see that peer production is, by and large, a form of cultural production, and thus bears structural similarities to existing cultural fields like art, literature, and journalism. The chapter shows how (1) peer‐production projects are clearly embedded in existing cultural fields, and often represent an autonomous form of production that seeks to resist certain economic and political pressures in favor of core values such as meritocracy and openness and (2) such autonomy is achieved through the enactment of those core values, which are in turn related to the social hierarchies, forms of exclusion, and other limitations that characterize these projects and the groups of people who populate them.

Helen Nissenbaum & Yochai Benkler

Commons‐based peer production is a socio‐economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio‐technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge, or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise. While there are many practical reasons to try to understand a novel system of production that has produced some of the finest software, the fastest supercomputer and some of the best web‐based directories and news sites, here we focus on the ethical, rather than the functional dimension. What does it mean in ethical terms that many individuals can find themselves cooperating productively with strangers and acquaintances on a scope never before seen? How might it affect, or at least enable, human action and affection, and how would these effects or possibilities affect our capacities to be virtuous human beings? We suggest that the emergence of peer production offers an opportunity for more people to engage in practices that permit them to exhibit and experience virtuous behavior. We posit: (a) that a society that provides opportunities for virtuous behavior is one that is more conducive to virtuous individuals; and (b) that the practice of effective virtuous behavior may lead to more people adopting virtues as their own, or as attributes of what they see as their self‐definition. The central thesis of this chapter is that socio‐technical systems of commons‐based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods but serve as a context for positive character formation. Exploring and substantiating these claims will be our quest, but we begin with a brief tour through this strange and exciting new landscape of commons‐based peer production and conclude with recommendations for public policy.

George Dafermos

From the beginning, boosters of peer production portrayed it as heralding a better way of life. Since then activists and researchers have detected in peer production the seeds of a post‐capitalist society (Oekonux Project, P2P Foundation) or worked to help policy makers and governments transition towards commons‐based models (FLOK Society Project). Others have attempted to engage critical intellectuals inside and outside academia ( Journal of Peer Production ) and to establish peer production as a promising research field in the social sciences (P2P Lab). This chapter retraces the history of these attempts, teases out their differences and convergences, and evaluates their impact.

Margie Borschke

Peer production is assumed to be virtuous and public‐spirited, a networked socio‐economic system of production, that is efficient, promotes individual agency, harnesses collective knowledge, creates robust technologies and information and contributes to sustaining the public domain in the Internet era. This organizational innovation is also often associated with the rise of social networking technologies, practices, and platforms in the 2000s and an ethos of participation, sharing, and remix. Yet at the heart of key conceptualizations of peer production is a tension between virtue and pragmatism, between a belief that particular kinds of networked spaces and practices can enable the development of personal and social virtues and also be more efficient than other forms of production. This tension becomes more visible in the metaphor, practices, and platforms of the sharing economy where ethical debates about agency, property, privacy, and collective rights abound and where utopian rhetoric acts as a cover for the corporate drive for efficiency over ethical concerns. This chapter considers these tensions and how the ideals of peer production were shaped by their social and material histories.

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay

This chapter traces the evolution of legal conditions meant to support the production and flourishing of digital, knowledge, intellectual or information commons by facilitating access and reuse while preserving them from enclosure. Licenses have been drafted and fine‐tuned in order to subvert and adapt copyright rules designed to reserve rather than to grant rights. Different legal options and conditions set up by peer‐production platforms, or single creators, to users and potential audience can ensure different levels of openness, leading to the construction of informational, cultural, knowledge, or digital commons. From free and open source software to creative works, including scientific articles, cultural heritage, public sector information, and open data, the nature of works which can be peer produced and subjected to an open license extended to functional works such as databases and tangible output, such as open hardware and Internet infrastructure. Reflecting political debates and ideologies in the digital commons sphere, licensing options oscillate between public domain, copyleft, and the reservation or the control of commercial use and derivative rights.

Sebastian Spaeth & Sven Niederhöfer

Peer‐production systems often attract larger communities of paid and unpaid volunteers, who contribute to their respective projects. This chapter examines different underlying motivations that fuel these contributions. It thereby takes a tripartite form and summarizes current literature on (1) individual motivations to participate, (2) selection of tasks, and (3) participation in peer production as a social practice. In the first two parts, we draw on self‐determination theory, which discusses various intrinsic (the joy performing the task itself), extrinsic (rewards such as pay), and internalized extrinsic motives (internalized mores and values). The discussed literature shows that contributors are motivated not by a single motive, but by a whole range of interacting intrinsic, internalized extrinsic, and extrinsic motives with different magnitudes. It further shows that peers’ motivation partly determines the type of task they will self‐allocate, whereby (internalized) extrinsic motives seem to play a crucial role in impelling individuals to perform mundane tasks. In the third part, we view peer‐production systems as social practices, conceptualizing these systems as collectives of contributors with shared general principles, whose lives increasingly become intertwined with these communities. Reviewed literature suggests that motivation may be influenced by factors such as social exposure and institutional frameworks.