Saturday, May 31, 2008

Commons-based peer production

A former professor sent me some information about commons-based peer production. Harvard Law School professor, Yochai Benkler, coined the phrase to describe the economics surrounding collaboration in networked environments.

My initial question was: How is this different from collective intelligence (e.g., Levy, 1994), wisdom of the crowds (e.g., Surowiecki), or the prosumer movement (e.g., Tapscott & Williams, 2006). It is my understanding (at least at this time) that collective intelligence investigates the thought process behind these actions, whereas wisdom of the crowds takes a more sociological stance. The work on prosumers may be most closely aligned with the commons-based peer production approach.

I need to read more about Benkler's work. Wikipedia has a couple of entries about the man and his work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Networked_information_economy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons-based_peer_production


A PDF version of his book, The Wealth of Networks is also available at http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Download_PDFs_of_the_book .