"Peer Pioneers"

Peer production is emerging as an alternative model of production that can harness human skill, ingenuity, an intelligence more efficiently and effectively than traditional firms.The way companies address peer production will share the future of industry and affect their very chances for survival.



Companies will need a strategy to address peer production that takes into account both the threats and opportunities for their It's a myth to say that peer production takes away wealth from the economy and thereby erode the ability for business to make profits. Treating peer production as a myth or a transient fad is a mistake.It's not just online networking.Google CEO Eric Schmidt -peer production is about more than sitting down & having a nice conversation with nice objectives & a nice attitude Eric Schmidt -It's about harnessing a new mode of production to take innovation and wealth creation to new levels. The time to address peer production is now. Barriers to entry are vanishing and the trade-offs that individuals make when deciding to contribute to projects and organizations are changing, creating opportunities to dramatically reconfigure the way we produce and exchange information, knowledge, and culture. 


Companies that recognize, address, and learn to tap peer production will benefit, while those that ignore and resist resist peer production cause companies to miss important opportunities for innovation and cost reduction, and may even go out of business. In it's purest form peer production a way of producing goods and services that relies entirely on self-organizing, egalitarian communities of individuals who come together voluntarily to produce a shared outcome. In reality, peer production mixes elements of hierarchy and self-organization and relies on meritocratic principles of organization The most skilled and experienced members of the community provide leadership and help integrate contributions from the community.

In many peer production communities, productive activities are voluntary and nonmonetary. They are voluntary in that people contribute to these communities because they want to and because they can.No one orders a worker to contribute to wikipedia or to contribute code to the Linux operating system. 
The Linux/wiki contributions are nonmonetary because most participants don't get paid to participate, contribute. Individuals determine if, what, and how much they want to produce. Just because people don't get paid to participate in peering does not mean, however,that they do not benefit from their participation in other ways. 

The economics of production have changed significantly as we have moved from an industrial to an information-based economy. In the industrial economy most opportunities to make things that were valuable and important to people were constrained by the high costs of making them. If you wanted to make a mass-circulation newspaper you needed a printing press and a physical distribution infrastructure, for delivering your papers door-to-door. Simply wanting to do this was not a sufficient condition to make it happen. You needed financing to obtain the physical capital. And, in order to get an acceptable return on your invested capital, you needed to orient production toward the market (i.e. you needed to sell subscriptions).


Today, billions of connected people around the planet can cooperate to make just about anything that requires human creativity, a computer, and an Internet connection. Unlike before, where costs of production were high, people can collaborate and share creations at very little costs. This means that individuals needn't rely on markets or capital intensive firms to make or trade all of the goods and services they desire. In fact, a growing proportion of the things we value (including newspapers can now be produces by us in cooperation with the people we interact with socially - simply because we want to.



So how can loose networks of peers possibly assemble goods and services that compete head-to-head with those of a large, deep-pocketed company?
For one, peering taps into voluntary motivations in a way that helps assign the right person to the right task more effectively than traditional firms. The reason is self-selection. When people voluntarily self-select for creative, knowledge-intensive tasks they are more likely than managers to choose tasks for which they are uniquely qualified. Who, after all, is more likely to know the full range of tasks you are best qualified to perform- you or the manager?


The originator of Linux, says "People just self select to do projects where they have expertise and interest." As long as communities have mechanisms for weeding out weak contributions.