The Emergence of Benefit-driven Production
The free software and free culture movements have radically changed the ways of producing software and knowledge goods, but that is only a start. Participation in such project is often benefit-driven rather than profit-driven: Participants get involved in order to realize some practical or social benefit, not because of monetary gains. Peer production also differs from market- and firm-based production in being non-hierarchical: people voluntarily cooperate as peers; there are no fixed employer/employee or client/contractor relationships. And peer production is based on commons: goods which are jointly developed and maintained by a community and which are shared according to community-defined rules.
Peer production is not just about producing knowledge: Hackerspaces and Fab Labs are the first forerunners of a commons-based production infrastructure. While commons-based peer production reaches beyond capitalism, the preconditions of its development are created by capitalism itself. The paradoxical relationship of capitalism to human labor leads to developments that might make the concept of labor (as we know it today) obsolete, and with it capitalism itself.
by Christian Siefkes on July 1st at 18:30 in Workshop I
Dr. Christian Siefkes is a freelance software engineer and author; he lives in Berlin, Germany. His main research interest is exploring the practices and the potential of commons-based peer production, the participatory and commons-oriented way of production that brings us free software, open content projects such as the Wikipedia, and an increasing number of open hardware projects. Co-founder of the bilingual Keimform-Blog. Homepage
Publications include: The Commons–Prosperity by Sharing (2010), with Silke Helfrich, Rainer Kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs), The Commons of the Future (2009), From Exchange to Contributions (2007).
Rufus Pollock
Daniel Dietrich
Jason Kitcat
Sebastian Hellmann
Lucy Chambers
Hauke Gierow
[...] an introductory talk on »Understanding Commons and Peer Production«. Christian is talking about »The Emergence of Benefit-driven Production«. The conference entrance fee is 30 Euro per [...]
[...] Open Knowledge Conference » The Emergence of Benefit-driven …Jun 3, 2011 … Publications include: The Commons–Prosperity by Sharing (2010), with Silke Helfrich, Rainer Kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs), The Commons of the … [...]