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August 5, 2006
Yochai Benkler on Commons-Based Peer Production
Here are my notes from Yochai Benkler's talk at Wikimedia. I managed to capture just a fraction of his ideas - he's a fast talker who spews interesting, insightful thoughts - certainly one of the hardest people I've ever liveblogged. -andy
Wikipedia is a salient cultural example of a phenomenon that's much broader, and tied to the particular econ transformation that comes from networked computers. When you have the kind of cultural production system like wikipedia injected into a modern democracy, you can see improvements in democracy and social justice.Between 1840 to and 1850, the cost of launching a newspaper jumped from around 10,000 dollars to over $2 million in current dollars. There was a stark bifurcation between producers and consumers - passive, large audiences and professional commercial producers.
The biggest supercomputers in the world have the equivalent speed of projects like seti@home, which uses decentralized home computers working together.
The networked information economy: radically decentralized, everyone can contribute to it. The most important inputs are widely distributed in the population, from computational resources to human creativity, intuition, experience and motivation. Behaviors that were once on the outside - cooperation, friendship, social motivations, move to the very core of economic life in the most technically and economically advanced societies.
Commons-based production: production without exclusion. Products freely available to everyone, individually or collectively, commercially or noncommercially, going in and going out.
Peer production. Large scale cooperation among people without price signals or managerial commands. They share material resources, like distributed computing, wireless mesh networks, distributed storage, or mixes of these things (like Skype and other P2P tools).
Free and open source software. He shows a chart of Apache web server's share of the market, growing from almost nothing in 1995 to 70 percent in July 2005. Software is a special case of a wider phenomenon of peer-production culture. Wikipedia is the leading representation of this culture. The first time I logged on, I was amazed that 2000 people could manage all this content with no official governance rules. But now it's even bigger, and faces various problems and threats. That's because it's grown beyond the small interest group that created it, and now has people with different interests affecting it, including people who don't like what it represents.
On the Nature wikipedia article. It showed that Wikipedia is a threat to traditional business models, no only because it's a competitor. For Britannica, there's a more fundamental challenge: the very concept that knowledge production isn't in the hands of the very few any more.
There are other peer production communities - flickr, delicious, myspace, Slashdot, etc. All of these are sites that have captured large cultural visibility that something big is happening. You may not be able to get together with friends on a Saturday night to build a car from scratch, but you can begin to build an encyclopedia. We're seeing the emergence of social sharing and exchange as a new model alongside the old model. It used to be outside the economy, now it's a part of it. It's radically decentralized authority and the authority to act. Self selection to tap diverse motivations, insights, capability, availability, attention. Crowding out creates a complex relationship with systems based on money and/or management.
We're seeing diverse cooperation platforms. Humanization is important, both face-to-face, but also just letting people have their say. This leads to the creation of community norms, trust construction, transparency, peer review, a sense of fairness. Fairness is often reciprocity based, but others, like Creative Commons, have no expectation of reciprocity.
This has all led to new opportunities for electronics manufacturers. People who once made TVs and other appliances now have to address the reality of a peer-produced content culture.
Social production is a fact, not a fad; it's the critical long term shift caused by the internet. But it's a threat to, and threatened by, incumbent business models: intellectual property, telecom policy, etc.
Autonomy, democracy, justice and development can all be improved with peer production. You see a shift from consumers to users, doing more for and by ourselves, and in a loose association with others. Search for Vikings in Google and you'll get a great site created by a single teacher. Just one person, not a publisher.
Democracy: our experience is purely with a mass-mediated public sphere. We will begin to learn what it means to have social production of the public sphere. Think Pentagon Papers: Ellsberg could only get it published by going back and forth with the Times, the Post, with the courts intervening. Modern day: when Diebold's voting machines had problems, there was little mass media coverage. One activist got the source code, put them online. You could read it for yourself. Make copies and distribute them. Use these online tools to help you. The code gets passed around to people with some expertise, identifying problems in the code. Diebold tries to fix it, but more people leak the latest problems and share them. Diebold try to use the DMCA to get the content removed from a university server. But it was too late - the cat was out of the bag. Knowledge can't be re-suppressed once it's exposed to the light of day. In the end, the voting machines get de-certified. This is a new way in which the public sphere distributes and produces knowledge.
Everyone is a pamphleteer, they often say. But who will help insure accuracy, quality? What role do citizen journalists play? No, not everyone is a pamphleteer, but we aren't intellectual lemmings, either.
Remix culture is the emergence of a new folk culture. Embracing of parodies, based on active participation. Critical evaluation is moving from academic seminars to blogs to Wikipedia. Look at the Wikipedia entry for Barbie Doll to see the critical analysis of the doll's roll in culture.
Justice. More of what makes for human welfare and development depends on information, knowledge and culture. If you look at things like health, literacy, life expectancy, GDP, etc, it all depends on access to knowledge. Commons-based peer production is beginning to help, though it won't necessarily make water any cleaner. But it still plays a role in development. Open source academic publishing, open content initiatives in developing countries, etc. Through peer production we'll be able to fill some of the needs untouched by the market in the developing world.
Technological threshold conditions enable greater individual human agency. Social sharing and exchange emerge as a major modality. (For some reason he shut off his slide before I could read any more of it.)
tag: wikimania2006
Posted by acarvin at August 5, 2006 9:52 AM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
