The Confines of Peer Production

Yochai Benkler basis his article, “The Wealth of Networks,” around a central statement that the social peer production network is beginning to excel beyond that of traditional industrial organizations. In many respects, this is undeniably true. Wikipedia, a striving peer produced online encyclopedia, has become a viable source of knowledge openly supplied by the collective minds of the common. The effectiveness of peer production is further supported in the example of open source software; in which a large collective body collaborates, presents ideas, shares knowledge, and ultimately assists in deriving successful products. However, these examples, though valid, are all centered on problems that contain only concrete variables, with a concrete solution.

In the case of Wikipedia, it is explicitly stated in the Policies of the website that information inputted by an individual must be factual and unbiased. Therefore, Wikipedia is a collection of concrete knowledge. In analyzing open source software, this continuing theme of concreteness is present. When someone decides to edit some freely distributed open source code to create a new product, they first decide what they want their spin-off of the software to be able to do, and in what ways they wish for it to defer from the previous version of the software which they are modifying. Though this is clearly subjective, this portion of the production is ultimately the decision of an individual or small collaborative group. Once they have their vision in mind, they look to community input for help in turning their ideas into actual code that can be executed by the computer. This is the point in the production in which the “peers” have direct influence, and the knowledge they provide is strictly factual and concrete. There is no bias when it comes to coding a particular sequence of actions to get a desired result, there is simple an absolute solution. Therefore, the “peer” influence on the production of open source software is clearly composed of the sharing of factual knowledge that results in a concrete solution, and thus open source software is highly successful.

It is when you throw in variables that lend themselves to opinion, bias, and lack of an absolute solution that peer production would lose stability. For instance, if you gathered a million people together and asked them all to contribute to the construction of a single elaborate and functional building complex, chaos would erupt as ideas awkwardly meshed due to differing emphasis and opinions on style, functionality, and so forth. However, if you gave this same group of a million people the detailed blueprints to a building and told them to construct this building, they would be able to swiftly produce the desired results. This is simply because, in this second example, the only remaining variable left to “peer production” is the physical assembly of the building. This has a single defined, concrete solution which can be solved through the utilization of the collective factual knowledge on the subject possessed by the mass.

Although Benkler’s article seems to bind the effectiveness of peer production to the confines of the virtual world, it is not this that limits its ability to be successful. The key defining factor in determining whether or not peer production will excel as a viable solution to a problem can be found through examining the nature of the solution; concrete vs. interpretational.