- Don’t Make Me Think Review (Final Paper)
- Basic Design Principles (Journal Summary)
- Branding Evolution (minute paper)
- The Web Reading Room (My Presentation)
- The Not so Simple Toothbrush (Journal 5)
- The Frog Design Process (Journal 4)
- Time, Consistency and Failure (Journal 3)
- Don’t Make Citizens Think (Proposal)
- Mobile Wireframe
- Simplicity is what you need it to be
- Purchasing Experience
- Video Games
- Comment on Jeff’s Wikinomics Review
- Free Internet for everyone?
- Learning Online
- The Networked Information Economy: Take Two
- Why does Wikipedia succeed when others fail?
- The changing social landscape
- DRM not so hard to break
- Quantity over Quality
- Comment on Paolo’s article abstract
- TVLand
- Comment on Peter’s TWoN Review
- What is peer/social production? How does money affect it?
- How would our economy survive reliance on peer production?
What is peer/social production? How does money affect it?
Thursday, August 7, 2008When we broke in to small groups on Monday to discuss new areas where peer/social production might be useful or successful, my group got a little side tracked. We had some trouble defining peer/social production and what affect money spend on the project or derived from the project might affect its status as peer/social production.
We thought of a few cases where peer/social production could be used to create artwork. Like the Mechanical Turk sheep artwork, an artist could ask people to upload random photos to a Web site and the artist would put them together in an artistic way. We also thought about putting a poem together in a similar manner where users submitted a single line and someone put them in a certain order to create a large poem that made sense and was artistic. But is this peer/social production if one person is in control the whole project and others are only allowed to participate in a small way without the opportunity to provide input? Then, what if the artist sells the artwork? Is that still peer/social production?
So then I started to wonder how money affects peer/social production. Some IBM employees are paid to participate in open software projects, but they are still considered peer/social production because the end product is not sold. But, IBM has based much of its business on the free software that has been created. They are essentially making a profit from the existence of the free software. I wonder how participants in a peer/social production project would feel if they later found out what they helped create, such as the artwork or poem, was sold for a large profit? Would they be upset? Or, would the pride they felt in having taken part in the successful project be enough?
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Original article from http://sfrost.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/what-is-socialpeer-production-how-does-money-affect-it/