Professor Benkler recently gave an excellent talk on peer production as a new paradigm for generating information in networked environments. He identified several examples of this method of information production, and even set out some conditions for when it works better than the two other general paradigms: firms and dispersed market exchange.
I’ve always been a little skeptical of bold claims about peer production because there is a tendency to ignore opportunity costs. For example, Professor Benkler discussed the NASA Clickworkers Project, in which over 85,000 different users perform discrete tasks related to classifying the terrain of Mars. These volunteers achieved results that were considered equal to a team of trained professionals working full time. Yet this nice example still does not advance Benkler’s thesis – that peer production is preferable. That it was costless to NASA does not mean it was costless to society: indeed, the time it took for 85,000 people to work (even if for a few minutes) could generate a great deal of social cost.
I decided to look at Professor Benkler’s paper – Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. While the paper certainly provides more theory to support his thesis, it still didn’t answer this question. The lingering assumption is that because people do this for their “hobby” it somehow falls outside the scrutiny of opportunity costs. This assumption becomes even more problematic because he presents peer production as a model whose prevalence will soon equal that of the firm. Certainly if peer production becomes so mainstream (as I agree with Benkler that it will), we can no longer ignore the costs of consuming thousands of peoples’ “hobby” time.
This triggers a related issue. Many academics have attempted to explain what drives these individuals to contribute so much time to peer productions. Some describe it as part of the “hacker culture.” If this is the case, will this ethic deteriorate if peer production becomes increasingly mainstream? Professor Benkler quickly dismissed Wikipedia’s recent issues, but I wonder if this is part of a growing trend. Great products of peer production, like Wikipedia, depend upon being new and counterculture. When they begin to achieve status within mainstream culture, the ethic may evolve in ways that undermine peer production itself.