NUST Institutions Library Catalogue

1 Introduction 9 2 Elements of Peer Production 13 2.1 Commons, Sharing, and Control over the Means of Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.2 Free Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.3 From Status to Reputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 3 Problems to Solve for Generalization 17 3.1 How to Coordinate the Producer Side with the Consumer Side? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 3.2 How to Allocate Limited Resources and Goods? 19 4 Organizing Shared Production 21 4.1 How to Find Others for Cooperation . . . . . . . 21 4.2 How to Obtain Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . 22 4.3 How to Ensure That Tasks Are Handled . . . . . 25 4.4 How to Assign Results of a Project . . . . . . . . 31 5 Fitting It All Together: A Peer Economy 41 5.1 Society as a Big Project or a Multitude of Projects 41 5.2 Sharing Effort Between Projects: Distribution Pools 42 5.3 Organizing Infrastructure and Public Services: Local Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 5.4 Coordinating Production: Prosumer Associations 54 5.5 Resource Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 5.6 Decision Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 5 Contents 6 Comparison with Other Modes of Production 77 6.1 Differences from a Market Economy . . . . . . . 77 6.2 Differences from a Planned Economy . . . . . . 88 7 Aspects of Life in a Peer Economy 91 7.1 Forms of Democratic Decision Making in Local Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 7.2 Stakeholder Involvement and Conflict Resolution 95 7.3 Education and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 7.4 Creative Works and Other Freely Sharable Goods101 7.5 Styles of Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 8 Concerns 109 8.1 How to Handle Contributions? . . . . . . . . . . 109 8.2 How to Handle Effort? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 8.3 What About Migration? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 8.4 Won’t There Be Need for Further Laws and Standards? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 8.5 Won’t Such a Society Revert to a Market Economy?126 8.6 Aren’t There Many Variants to the Proposed Model? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 9 Conclusion: The Development of a Peer Economy 131 Bibliography 137 A Mathematical Details of the Auctioning Models 143 A.1 Task Auctioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 A.2 Product Auctioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 A.3 Resource Auctioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 A.4 Virtual Effort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 6

E Book