---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Christian Siefkes <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 8:59 PM Subject: Recent text on commons-based production To: Wouter Tebbens <[email protected]>, Michel Bauwens < [email protected]> Dear Wouter and Michel, did you notice my text "The Emergence of Benefit-driven Production" <http://www.keimform.de/2011/benefit-driven-production/>, which I wrote for this years' Open Knowledge Conference? It's my first longer theoretical text in English for quite some time, since I had mainly published in German during the last years. More English texts will follow. Here's the abstract: --- The free software and free culture movements have radically changed the ways of producing software and knowledge goods. In many cases, participation in such project is benefit-driven rather than profit-driven. Participants get involved in order to realize some practical or social benefit, not because of monetary gains. Another difference from market- and firm-based production is that peer production is non-hierarchical: people voluntarily cooperate as peers; there are no fixed employer/employee or client/contractor relationships. And peer production is based on commons: goods which are jointly developed and maintained by a community and which are shared according to community-defined rules. Peer production is not just about producing knowledge: Hackerspaces and Fab Labs are the first forerunners of a commons-based production infrastructure. While commons-based peer production reaches beyond capitalism, the preconditions of its development are created by capitalism itself. The paradoxical relationship of capitalism to human labor leads to developments that might make the concept of labor (as we know it today) obsolete, and with it capitalism itself. --- Best regards Christian -- |------- Dr. Christian Siefkes ------- [email protected] ------- | Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/ | Peer Production Everywhere: http://peerconomy.org/wiki/ |---------------------------------- OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 -- I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much, of course -- the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end. -- Douglas Adams -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens