Peer production is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome. The production of content by the general public rather than by paid professionals and experts in the field. In these communities, the efforts of a large number of people are coordinated to create meaningful projects. The information age, especially the Internet, has provided the peer production process with new collaborative possibilities and has become a dominant and important mode of producing information. Free and open source software are two examples of modern processes of peer production. One of the earliest instances of networked peer production is Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...

 , a project that involves volunteers that make "etexts" from out-of-copyright works available online. Modern examples are Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, an online encyclopedia, and Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, a computer operating system. For-profit enterprises mostly use partial implementations of peer production. Amazon

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 built itself around user reviews, Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 is constituted by user-generated content (i.e. Youtube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

). Peer production refers to the production process on which the previous examples are based. Commons-based peer production

Commons-based peer production

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of socio-economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical...

 is a subset of peer production.

Peer production occurs in a socio-technical system which allows thousands of individuals to effectively cooperate to create a non-exclusive given outcome . These collective efforts are informal. Peer production is a collaborative effort with no limit to the amount of discussion or changes that can be made to the product. However, as in the case of Wikipedia, a large amount, in fact the majority, of this collaborative effort is maintained by a relatively small number of devoted and active individuals . It is the consistent activity of these individuals which dictates the success on a given project.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community through an open call....

 products like community cookbooks were a form of peer production. Gooseberry Patch

Gooseberry Patch

Gooseberry Patch was founded in 1984 by Vickie Hutchins and Jo Ann Martin, who were neighbors. Before starting their catalog business Martin was a first-grade teacher, and Hutchins was a flight attendant....

  has used its customer/friend community to create its line of exclusive cookbooks for over 18 years.

External links

• TED: Ideas worth spreading - Yochai Benkler
  Yochai Benkler
  Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American professor of Law and author. Since 2007, he has been the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.- Biography :In 1984, Benkler...
  
  introduces peer production.
• The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing Michel Bauwens, We Magazine Volume 2
• Quality Management of Peer Production