commons-based peer production
:: in the digitally
networked environment For decades our common understanding of the organization of economic
production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either
as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following
price signals. In this paper Yochai Benkler explain why we are beginning to see the emergence
of a new, third mode of production, in the digitally networked environment, a mode he calls commons-based
peer production. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year
old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free
software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers
contributing to large and small scale projects, where the central organizing principle is that
the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials.
No one “owns” the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how
it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result has been the emergence of
a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms
and do not choose their projects in response to price signals. This paper explains that while
free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic
phenomenon. Benkler suggest that we are seeing the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode
of production in the digitally networked environment. He calls this mode “commons-based
peer production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based modes of firms
and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate
on largescale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals,
rather than either market prices or managerial commands.
Benkler explain why this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies
when the object of production is information or culture, and where the physical capital necessary
for that production— computers and communications capabilities—is widely distributed
instead of concentrated. In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets
for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information
and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer production has an advantage in what Benkler
call “information opportunity cost.” That is, it loses less information about who
the best person for a given job might be than either of the other two organizational modes. Second,
there are substantial increasing returns, in terms of allocation efficiency, to allowing larger
clusters of potential contributors to interact with large clusters of information resources in
search of new projects and opportunities for collaboration. Removing property and contract as
the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in
allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources
to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators. This results in the potential for
substantial allocation gains. The article concludes with an overview of how these models use
a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually
solved in managerial and market-based systems by property, contract, and managerial commands.
>abstract from *Coase’s
Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm* by Yochai Benkler, august 2002
related context
> oekonux: from free software
to free society? october 28, 2002
> open_source_art_hack.
april 30, 2002
> science commons:
building a free flow of knowledge. march 15, 2002
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