Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 62

In peer production some producers may be paid or employed as wage labor, or work for the market as freelancers, but not necessarily. All of them produce a commons. The work is not directed by the corporate hierarchies, but through the mutual coordination mechanisms of the productive community, to which the corporate hierarchies have to defer if they want to participate in this type of production. Peer production is based on open and transparent systems, in which everyone can see the signals of the work done by others, and can, therefore, adapt their contribution to the needs of the system as a whole.

Peer production is often based on “stigmergic,” from the Greek στίγμα (“mark, sign”) and the έργον (“work”), cooperation. In its most generic formulation, stigmergy is the phenomenon of indirect communication among agents and actions (Marsh & Onof, 2007, p. 1). Think how ants or termites exchange information by laying down pheromones (chemical traces). Through this indirect form of communication, these social insects manage to build complex structures such as trails and nests. An action leaves a trace that stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent (ant, termite, or commoner in the case of peer production). Therefore, in the context of peer production, stigmergic collaboration is the “collective, distributed action in which social negotiation is stigmergically mediated by Internet‐based technologies” (Elliott, 2006). For example, see how free and open source software code lines and the Wikipedia entries are produced in a distributed and ad hoc manner through contributions by large numbers of people.