Benkler.+Commons-based+Peer+Production+and+Virtue

=Benkler, Yochai, and Helen Nissenbaum. "Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue."=

The Journal of Political Philosophy 14.4 (2006): 394-419. Wiley Online Library, 03 Nov. 2006. Web. 22 Mar. 2011. .

Abstract
"Commons-based peer production is a socio-economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio-technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise. While there are many practical reasons to try to understand a novel system of production that has produced some of the ﬁnest software, the fastest supercomputer and some of the best web-based directories and news sites, here we focus on the ethical, rather than the functional dimension. What does it mean in ethical terms that many individuals can ﬁnd themselves cooperating productively with strangers and acquaintances on a scope never before seen? How might it affect, or at least enable, human action and affection, and how would these effects or possibilities affect our capacities to be virtuous human beings? We suggest that the emergence of peer production offers an opportunity for more people to engage in practices that permit them to exhibit and experience virtuous behavior. We posit: (a) that a society that provides opportunities for virtuous behavior is one that is more conducive to virtuous individuals; and (b) that the practice of effective virtuous behavior may lead to more people adopting virtues as their own, or as attributes of what they see as their self-deﬁnition. The central thesis of this paper is that socio-technical systems of commons-based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods but serve as a context for positive character formation. Exploring and substantiating these claims will be our quest, but we begin with a brief tour through this strange and exciting new landscape of commons-based peer production and conclude with recommendations for public policy" (Benkler).

Argument
Although the authors go into the the market and economic advantages of peer production, their focus is primarily on why individuals are overlooking these and contributing to free web-based systems. Benkler and Nissenbaum discuss the attributes that drive peer production and therefore link it to virtue; volunteerism, self-selection, "self-regarding" virtues such as self-direction and principles, and "other-regarding" virtues like the satisfaction of contribution. This article equates this collaboration to a "'barn raising' like production of the Net" and details the certain writing styles and conceptual challenges such a format creates.

Key Passages
"While its functional success forces observers to take free software seriously as a sustainable form of production, what makes free software interesting from a social or moral perspective is its social and human structure. No one “owns” a free software project, though individuals own—in a formal sense—the software they contribute. Its touchstone is that all these individual contributors agree that none of them shall exclude anyone else from using it—whether they contributed to the development or not."

"The important point is that Wikipedia requires much more than mere mechanical cooperation among participants. It requires a commitment to a particular approach to conceiving of one’s task, and a style of writing and describing concepts, that are far from intuitive or natural. It requires self-discipline. It enforces the behavior it requires primarily through appeal to the common enterprise in which the participants are engaged, coupled with a thoroughly transparent platform that faithfully records and renders all individual interventions in the common project and facilitates discourse among participants about how their contributions do, or do not, contribute to this common enterprise. This combination of an explicit statement of common purpose, transparency, discourse and the ability of participants to identify each other’s actions and counteract them—that is, edit out “bad” or “faithless” definitions—seems to have succeeded in keeping this community from devolving into inefficacy or worse."

"At its core, peer production is a model of social production, emerging alongside contract- and market-based, managerial-firm based and state-based production. These forms of production are typified by two core characteristics. The first is decentralization. Authority to act resides with individual agents faced with opportunities for action, rather than in the hands of a central organizer, like the manager of a firm or a bureaucrat. The second is that they use social cues and motivations, rather than prices or commands, to motivate and coordinate the action of participating agents. As a descriptive matter, the phenomenon is a product of the emergence of digital networks and the rising importance of information and cultural production."

“...peer-to-peer technologies return the Internet to its original vision, in which everyone creates as well as consumes.” (Oram). Those engaged in peer-to-peer activities “are active participants, not just passive ‘browsers.’ ” They are writing code, collaborating in community networks, commenting on the news, and so on."

Selected Works Cited
This article has been cited by:

R. Procter, R. Williams, J. Stewart, M. Poschen, H. Snee, A. Voss, M. Asgari-Targhi, Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 2010,368, 1926, 403

End User Development and Meta-Design:, Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 2010, 22, 1

Hugh Brown, Musowiki.net: notes on the creation of an online community music facility, International Journal of Community Music, 2010, 3, 2, 277

Anne Gerdes, Revealing preconditions for trustful collaboration in CSCL, International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 2010, 5, 3, 34

Ugo Pagallo, Massimo Durante, Three Roads to P2P Systems and Their Impact on Business Practices and Ethics, Journal of Business Ethics, 2010, 90, S4, 551

ALBERTO CORSÍN JIMÉNEZ, Relations and disproportions: The labor of scholarship in the knowledge economy, American Ethnologist, 2008, 35, 2

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