[p2p-research] Ted Leung on Design and Commons-based Production

Wed Sep 2 08:57:57 CEST 2009

just wrote this:

the emerging new paradigm of production that is arising out of the new
participative processes.

The new institutional reality could be described as follows:

-          At the core are the enabling collaborative socio-technological
platforms, that allow knowledge workers, software developers and open design
communities to collaborate on joint projects.  Interesting questions already
arise here: who is the driving force behind the creation & development of
such platforms? They can be initiated by developing communities, managed and
maintained by a new type of non-profit institution (like the FLOSS
Foundations), or they can be corporate platforms that have been opened up to
external participants

-          Around the corporate platform is the open design community and
the knowledge/software/design commons ruled by a set of licenses which
determine the particular nature of the property. Is it a true commons
license like the GPL, a sharing license like the Creative Commons where the
stress is on the individual sovereignity in determining the level of sharing
that is allowed; or is it a corporate license, giving very limited rights,
or with outright digital sharecropping, i.e. the expropriation of the
totality of the creative output reserved for usage by the organizing
corporation?

-          Around the commons are the entrepreneurial coalitions that
benefit and sustain the design commons, create added value on top of it, and
sell this as products or services to the market. Important questions raised
here are: how is the coalition itself organized? Do all parties have equal
say, as in the Linux Foundation, or does one big party dominate, like with
the Eclipse Foundation and IBM. How does the business ecology relate to the
community. Is is nothing but a corporate commons?

-          Finally, there is a funding infrastructure, the stream of returns
from the monetized market sphere, to the commons, its community, and the
infrastructure of cooperation? Do businesses support the community directly,
through the foundations? Is the government or a set of public authorities
involved.

When we look at this set interlocking triad (community – foundation –
business) or quaternary structure (if public authorities are involved), we
can now distinguish at least 3 main models

-          In commons centered peer production, like Linux, the community is
at the core, and a real commons operate, with the community strong enough to
sustain its own infrastructure

-          In a sharing environment, where individuals share their creative
endeavour, it is the corporate third party platform which monetizes the
attention space, and may control the platform to a significant degree

-          In a crowdsourced environment, participant producers are even
more isolated from each other, and the corporation integrates them in the
value chain which they control.

A good illustration of the various possibilities is Lego. Lego still
operates as a classical producer of toys, selling to consumer; in Lego
Factory, it has its crowdsourced environment, where co-designers can take a
cut of the kits they succeed in selling; the new Lego World virtual
environment is a sharing environment; finally, Lugnet is true
commons-oriented peer production, happening outside the control of the
company altogether.

Here are ten different co-creation modalities, depending on the polarity of
control between peer producers and the corporate entities:

1. *Consumers*: you make, they consume. The classic model.

2. *Self-service*: you make, they go get it themselves. This is where
consumers start becoming prosumers, but the parameters of the cooperation
are totally set by the producing corporation. It’s really not much more than
a strategy of externalization of costs. Think of ATM’s and gas stations. We
could call it simple externalization.

3. *Do-it-yourself*: you design, they make it themselves. One step further,
pioneered by the likes of Ikea, where the consumers, re-assembles the
product himself. Complex externalization of business processes.

4. *Company-based Crowdsourcing <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Crowdsourcing>.
*The company organizes a value chain which lets the wider public produce the
value, but under the control of the company.

5. *Co-design*: you set the parameters, but you design it together

For examples, see here http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Design

6. *Co-creativity*: you both create cooperatively. In this stage, the
corporation does not even set the parameters, the prosumer is an equal
partner in the development of new products. Perhaps the industrial model of
the adventure sports material makers would fit here.

For examples, see here http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Creation

7. *Sharing communities create the value, Web 2.0 proprietary platforms,
attempt to monetize participation*.

8. *Peer production proper*: communities create the value, using a Commons,
with assistance from corporations who attempt to create derivative streams
of value. Linux is the paradigmatic example.

9. *Peer production with cooperative production*: peer producers create
their own vehicles for monetization.

The OS Alliance <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/OS_Alliance> is an example of
this

10. *Peer production communities or sharing communities place themselves
explicitely outside of the monetary economy*.

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 8/29/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Another issue is not to see peer production processes 'in isolation'
> >
> > if we look at free software, we see it is the companies that pay
> attention
> > to the 'last mile of design', and von Hippel says something similar in
> his
> > book.  The open design communities themselves are less interested in  the
> > 'commercial design' phase, because they don't need to sell, and have
> > sufficient technical skills to use the programs/products in other ways.
> >
> > So my take is that we can have open design of the innards, while
> > market-oriented companies can still compete on the outward designs ...
>
> In any case, open-source doesn't require coordinated design by p2p
> communities.  If anything, it facilites independent efforts by
> individuals and small groups to build on others' platforms.  The
> important thing is that the platform be in the public domain, with no
> legal barriers to "letting a hundred flowers bloom" when it comes to
> building modular accessories for it.
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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