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What is peer/social production? How does money affect it?

Thursday, August 7, 2008

When 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/
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