Union Square Ventures posts some interesting comments from its Union Square Sessions, an event “focused on the topic of peer production and open data architectures.” The full transcript can be found here.
Yochai Benkler, who originally coined the term “peer production,” offers a new and more encompassing term, “social production.”
I’ve actually started to use the term social production to cover the two distinct phenomena. [For] individual action…that gets coordinated [later] by some platform, [I use] “commons based production” (people created web sites and linked to other web sites for their own reasons, Google recognized an opportunity to exploit that effort to improve search with page rank)…and [I use] peer production [for] the more self-conscious cooperative platforms (Wikipedia).
Tim O’Reilly, citing Dan Bricklin’s 2001 paper, The Cornucopia of the Commons, appears to see things similarly:
[Dan] pointed out [that you can either] get volunteers to [produce a good] or you can architect the system in such a way that it’s produced as a byproduct of people’s individual selfish activity. And I thought that was a really profound insight, because a lot of peer production examples that we see, like open source software or Wikipedia are…people coming together [on a] network…to build something [they] consciously contribute to. Whereas Napster was a great example of a system that was built in such a way that people were just pursuing their own activities, but because of the way the system was designed, you created, as a side-effect, this…peer good.
Union Square partner Brad Burdham observes that “Social production systems seem to deliver a much higher portion of the economic value created to the consumers than traditional production systems do.” He cites O’Reilly’s comment that “if you look at…Ebay or Google, even though they’re very, very successful companies, they’re actually pretty generous in creating value for people outside the company”.
Burdham suggests that “[t]his may be because peer producers could get restless if they felt that too much of the value they created was being appropriated by others. It could also be happening simply because the economics of social production make it possible for people to be generous.”
Tom Evslin suggests that the generosity of social production can be used as a competitive weapon. To make his point, he offers an intriguing parallel between, of all things, Craigslist and Microsoft:
[I]f we think of Craigslist’s strategy, it’s a brilliant anti-competitive strategy and I don’t mean a value judgment by that. How do you compete with them? If you’re not in the areas that they charge for, then you can’t make any money because you can’t charge for those areas either. So you can say, “Okay, well, I’ll go compete in San Francisco by giving the ads away,” but you don’t have the readers in San Francisco. So what they’ve done is they’ve said that I’ve got the network effects from all the places that I give the ads away that I use to make the ads more valuable in the places that I sell them. And so I don’t think it’s just negligence that they haven’t got around to charging for the other places. It’s deliberately focusing the value on where they’re extracting the money. It’s like the Microsoft strategy of always pricing under Lotus, because you just don’t want to leave any room for a competitor. And so here’s the brilliant I’ll price it free in most places so you can’t go around me and get in anywhere, and I’ll expect value from a few sweet places which you can’t beat me there because the value I’m giving away for all the free places.
Mitch Shapiro at 2:18 PM|Comments(0)
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