User talk:Cdutestaccount

Peer Production

 * Editors note: I do NOT claim to be an 'expert' in this particular area, so please do NOT criticize me for that. I'm simply making my FIRST entry and by all means, I'm not expecting it to be 100% perfect by any stretch. With that out of the way, feel free to move on reading as you wish.

A concept (explained by Yale Law Professor, Yochai Benkler) generally meaning to enlist the help of over a 1000 people in the world to write an online encyclopedia or book of knowledge. Professor Benkler believes motivation for participating in the sharing of knowledge through peer production is based on "indirect appropriation" -- that is, money, design of the end product and/or the pleasure or social profile gained through involvement in peer production. In certain circumstances new production promises to provide the most efficient solution by bringing together the best intellects for the job. It can do this because it has the capacity to utilise a vast distributed network of knowledge which, in certain circumstances, is far superior to any other more formally or traditionally organised mode of knowledge production.

At pg 337 of Benkler's Journal entry, it says...
 * "The advantages of peer production are, then, improved identification and allocation of human creativity. These advantages appear to have become salient, because human creativity itself has become salient. In the domain of information and culture, production generally comprises the combination of preexisting information/cultural inputs, human creativity, and the physical capital necessary to (1) fix ideas and human utterances in media capable of storing and communicating them and (2) transmit them."

Another interesting extract from Benkler's journal entry says:
 * "In one way, however, academic peer production and commercial production are similar. Both are composed of people who are professional information producers. The individuals involved in production have to keep body and soul together from information production. However low the academic salary is, it must still be enough to permit one to devote most of one’s energies to academic work. The differences reside in the modes of appropriation and in the modes of organization—in particular, how projects are identified and how individual effort is allocated to projects. Academics select their own projects and contribute their work to a common pool that eventually comprises our knowledge of a subject matter, while nonacademic producers will often be given their marching orders by managers, who take their cue from market studies and eventually sell the product in the market."

Cdutestaccount (talk) 23:42, 17 July 2011 (UTC)