commons-based peer production Concepts

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu · 4 Nov 2025 · 246pp · 65,143 words

Linux operating system, also built by volunteers. He argued that we were witnessing the rise of an entirely new mode of production, which he labeled “commons-based peer production.” As he wrote, “its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

by Clay Shirky · 28 Feb 2008 · 313pp · 95,077 words

something of global significance. Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar and network theorist and author of The Wealth of Networks, calls nonmarket creation of group value “commons-based peer production” and draws attention to the ways people are happy to cooperate without needing financial reward. Wikipedia is peer production par excellence, set up to allow

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Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press (2006) links economics with political and legal theory, sketching out a vision of a world where “commons-based peer production” is allowed to flourish. Page 136: Wikipedia deletion and restoration Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas’s work on visualizing the history of Wikipedia edits

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech

by Jamie Susskind · 3 Sep 2018 · 533pp

difficult—can be solved if enough people are working on it. Where it is undertaken without topdown control, this kind of activity has been called commons-based peer production or open-source production.50 Where there’s more central direction and control, it tends to be called crowdsourcing. In the digital lifeworld it will

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be possible, using commons-based peer production or crowdsourcing, to invite the citizenry directly to help set the political agenda, devise policies, and draft and refine legislation. Advocates of this sort of

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Coleman, E. Gabriella 180, 181, 404 collaborative democracy see Wiki Democracy Collini, Stefan 407 Collins,Victor 134 command economy 265, 329 commons 331–4, 335 commons-based peer production 244 communication liberty and private power 190–1 perception-control 148, 150–1, 229 communism 12 ‘fully automated luxury’ 328 community, freedom of see republican

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It

by Jonathan Zittrain · 27 May 2009 · 629pp · 142,393 words

as a Modality of Economic Production, 114 YALE L.J. 273 (2004). 66. See Yochai Benkler & Helen Nissenbaum, Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue, 14 J. POL. PHIL. 394 (2006) (arguing that socio-technical systems of commons-based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods, but also serve as

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, supra note 84; Wikipedia, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipedia#History (as of May 16, 2007, 15:44 GMT). 86. For further discussion of commons-based peer production (including an examination of free software and Wikipedia) as an alternate economic modality, see Benkler, supra note 65, at 334—36. 87. There is evidence

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

by Nadia Eghbal · 3 Aug 2020 · 1,136pp · 73,489 words

source. In the early 2000s, Yochai Benkler expanded upon Ostrom’s model by applying her findings to the online world. He terms this communal structure commons-based peer production (CBPP) in a 2002 essay called “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm.’” (The title is a reference to Linux’s

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, before finally adding their sections back into the main group. Coase’s theory of the firm looks more like the former approach, while Benkler’s commons-based peer production resembles the latter. In terms of coordination effort, it could be less costly to designate one person as the leader, whose job it is to

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motivation makes it easier for people to self-organize to achieve the same outcome. Benkler is careful to emphasize that he does not think that commons-based peer production is always preferable to the firm, but rather yet another possible outcome: I am not suggesting that peer production will supplant markets or firms. I

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over the other two in identifying and allocating human capital/creativity.112 A few of the conditions that Benkler identifies as necessary to pull off commons-based peer production are intrinsic motivation, modular and granular tasks, and low coordination costs. Intrinsic motivation is the currency of the commons: members do the work because they

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of open source. It explains the success of prominent open source projects built by big, decentralized communities, like the web application framework Ruby on Rails. Commons-based peer production also explains why some developers hold the view that money and open source don’t mix. If production runs on intrinsic motivation, money is an

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing · 13 Jul 2016 · 443pp · 98,113 words

subsidised public transport and accelerate the loss of public bus services. The real sharing economy is exciting some analysts. Paul Mason sees the emergence of commons-based peer production in the likes of Wikipedia, Linux, OpenStreetMap and Mozilla’s Firefox. In Spain, arts and culture collectives La Tabacalera and Medialab-Prado are prime examples

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider · 10 Sep 2018 · 326pp · 91,559 words

industrial civilization faced a crisis of comparable import, as well as the germ of what could come next. He zeroed in on the notion of commons-based peer production—the modes by which online networks enable people to create and share horizontally, not as bosses and employees but as equals. It was a new

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike

by Eugene W. Holland · 1 Jan 2009 · 265pp · 15,515 words

, production is integrated into the firm and triggered by managerial command; where they are low, production is out sourced and triggered by market pricing mechanisms. Commons-based peer production breaks completely free of this paradigm: participating programmers are not paid for their contributions, nor are they told what to do by some supervising manager

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and, as a rule, never meet one another face-to-face. Given its Remarkable success in the realm of knowledge and informa tion, Internet-mediated commons-based peer production is an Important alternative to the now-dominant but clearly threatened capitalist mode of organizing knowledge production, appropriation, exploitation, and dis semination, and it represents

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words

planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?”146 Not only did it become a great operating system; it became a model for commons-based peer production in other realms, from Mozilla’s Firefox browser to Wikipedia’s content. By the 1990s there were many models for software development. There was the

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in history. So why do people contribute? Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler dubbed Wikipedia, along with open-source software and other free collaborative projects, examples of “commons-based peer production.” He explained, “Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social

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common endeavor. Many of the advances that created the Internet and its services occurred in this fashion, which the Harvard scholar Yochai Benkler has labeled “commons-based peer production.”32 The Internet allowed this form of collaboration to be practiced on a much larger scale than before. The building of Wikipedia and the Web

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression

by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean · 9 Nov 2012

examples are introduced, especially work by artists and programmers keen to offer alternatives to mainstream development, ranging from the performances of the livecoding scene to commons-based peer production. These demonstrate that new ideas emerge through wider recursive processes, which reflect the communicative and linguistic dimensions of work and action. If the first chapter

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processes. To Leach, this necessitates a critique of current ideas on valorization that disregard a deeper understanding of creative processes and commons-based production.42 Commons-based peer production is one model of collective creation in this respect, challenging traditional descriptions of productive activities and standard organizational forms that turn social relations into proprietary