Commons-Based Peer Production
Yochai Benkler describes “commons-based peer-production” as “groups of individuals [that] successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals...”[1] Citing Wikipedia, the ubiquitous online user-generated encyclopedia, Benkler points how peer-production “is usually maintained by some combination of social norms, legal rules, and a technically backed hierarchy that is validated by social norms.” Thus while Wikipedia’s organization involves a small number of system administrators, “substantial play has been given to self-policing by participants, and to informal and quasi-formal community-based dispute resolution mechanisms.”[2] Although Wikipedia exists entirely on the Internet, its fundamental structure relies on social norms acquired in “real-world” society.
To understand how designers can work with commons-based peer-production to shape urban space, it is helpful to think of a scaffold. In Building the Unfinished, (1977) architect Lars Lerup describes the way in which houses are built in the small towns of Lilla Kornö and Smögen in Sweden: “precut, marked timber was ‘knotted’ together, layer upon layer, up to the height of one story, then a set of attic floor joists was run across, and finally roof rafters, meeting a ridge board, formed the outline of the gabled roof. The resulting structure, a mere scaffold of a house, was the prefabricated part; now the family, with some assistance from the local carpenter, had to turn it into a real house… Once the family had decided upon the extent of the work, [the carpenter] Engström, with the assistance of the older boys, started a process of articulation of the embryonic house…”[3] In the same way the Lerup describes the structure of the house as a scaffold to accommodate the residents’ input into the home’s form, it is possible for designers to create participation frameworks that organize and structure online activities and the user-generated-content that emerges from those actions.
In Sweden, pre-fabricated scaffolds were shipped to remote fishing villages where the resident families were then responsible for filling the scaffold with elements of a complete house.
Examples of such frameworks structuring the online participation of real-world communities can be found in even the early days of the Internet. In Virtual Communities, author Howard Rheingold discusses the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), an early online community founded by Stewart Brand in 1985. A critical component of the WELL was a forum for Deadheads, fans of the band the Grateful Dead. “The Deadheads, many of whom weren’t born when the band started touring, have a strong feeling of community that they can manifest only in large groups when the band has concerts,” writes Rheingold. “Deadheads can spot each other on the road via the semiotics of window decals and bumper stickers, or on the streets via tye-dyed uniforms, but Deadheads didn’t have a place… [The Grateful Dead conference on WELL] was so phenomenally successful that for the first several years, Deadheads were by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise.”[4]
Internet-based social activity, building on pre-existing social practices, incorporates elements of both traditional social networking practices and mass media consumption. Though interactions with computers are 1-to-1—in most cases, one person is interfacing with one computer—the effect of those interactions can be very public. It is now possible, through using the Internet, to show your face too the world while locked in your own bedroom.
The breathtakingly rapid and pervasive emergence of Facebook owes its success in large part to this attribute. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg commented in a 2007 interview, “Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That’s a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We’re not thinking about ourselves as a community—we’re not trying to build a community—we’re not trying to make new connections.”[5]
[1] Yochai Benkler, Coases Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm. Online abstract accessed via http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html on 4-26-2010.
[2] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 104
[3] Lars Lerup. Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Action. (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1977), 65.
[4] Howard Rheingold. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1994), 49.
[5] Laura Locke. “The Future of Facebook.” Time Magazine, Jul 17, 2007. Accessed via http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1644040,00.html#ixzz0X99dNfWF on 4-26-2010.
To understand how designers can work with commons-based peer-production to shape urban space, it is helpful to think of a scaffold. In Building the Unfinished, (1977) architect Lars Lerup describes the way in which houses are built in the small towns of Lilla Kornö and Smögen in Sweden: “precut, marked timber was ‘knotted’ together, layer upon layer, up to the height of one story, then a set of attic floor joists was run across, and finally roof rafters, meeting a ridge board, formed the outline of the gabled roof. The resulting structure, a mere scaffold of a house, was the prefabricated part; now the family, with some assistance from the local carpenter, had to turn it into a real house… Once the family had decided upon the extent of the work, [the carpenter] Engström, with the assistance of the older boys, started a process of articulation of the embryonic house…”[3] In the same way the Lerup describes the structure of the house as a scaffold to accommodate the residents’ input into the home’s form, it is possible for designers to create participation frameworks that organize and structure online activities and the user-generated-content that emerges from those actions.
In Sweden, pre-fabricated scaffolds were shipped to remote fishing villages where the resident families were then responsible for filling the scaffold with elements of a complete house.
Examples of such frameworks structuring the online participation of real-world communities can be found in even the early days of the Internet. In Virtual Communities, author Howard Rheingold discusses the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), an early online community founded by Stewart Brand in 1985. A critical component of the WELL was a forum for Deadheads, fans of the band the Grateful Dead. “The Deadheads, many of whom weren’t born when the band started touring, have a strong feeling of community that they can manifest only in large groups when the band has concerts,” writes Rheingold. “Deadheads can spot each other on the road via the semiotics of window decals and bumper stickers, or on the streets via tye-dyed uniforms, but Deadheads didn’t have a place… [The Grateful Dead conference on WELL] was so phenomenally successful that for the first several years, Deadheads were by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise.”[4]
Internet-based social activity, building on pre-existing social practices, incorporates elements of both traditional social networking practices and mass media consumption. Though interactions with computers are 1-to-1—in most cases, one person is interfacing with one computer—the effect of those interactions can be very public. It is now possible, through using the Internet, to show your face too the world while locked in your own bedroom.
The breathtakingly rapid and pervasive emergence of Facebook owes its success in large part to this attribute. As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg commented in a 2007 interview, “Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That’s a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We’re not thinking about ourselves as a community—we’re not trying to build a community—we’re not trying to make new connections.”[5]
[1] Yochai Benkler, Coases Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm. Online abstract accessed via http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html on 4-26-2010.
[2] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 104
[3] Lars Lerup. Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Action. (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1977), 65.
[4] Howard Rheingold. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1994), 49.
[5] Laura Locke. “The Future of Facebook.” Time Magazine, Jul 17, 2007. Accessed via http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1644040,00.html#ixzz0X99dNfWF on 4-26-2010.
Participation Frameworks for Sampling
The spatialization of commons-based peer-production takes two forms. When a participation framework is used to sample environmental information, the result is crowdsourcing. When a framework is designed to project online content into space, the result is emergent urbanism.
Ushahidi allows people to upload crisis information from a variety of sources including text messages, e-mail, and direct web input. This aggregated data can then be used to direct support and aid.
Although Wikipedia is the best-known crowdsourced website, others directly apply the “wisdom of crowds” to space. Yelp!, for example, allows users to upload information about commercial establishments to the website and score them based on various characteristics like quality, cost, and popularity. The focus of the website is shops and restaurants (and the business model depends on this focus), but people have learned that many kinds of locations and places can be rated, from parks to plazas to bike paths. Numerous similar projects involve crowdsourcing as a means of gathering information about public places. Bench Blog in LA, for example, uses a Google map to document the conditions of LA’s 17,000 bus stops, while SeeClickFix.com provides a mechanism for citizens to report things like pot holes and vandalism to community groups, government, and news media.[1]
Combined with geotagging, the use of GPS or other locative technologies to mark data, crowdsourced information can be used to generate powerful maps. Ushahidi, named for the Swahili word for “testimony”, is an open source mapping framework used to consolidate crisis information and direct aid. Originally developed to map election violence in Kenya in 2008, the platform has since been redeployed in different political crises and, most recently, in response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Information can be added to Ushahidi’s maps by a variety of methods, including text messages and e-mail. The flexible data input mechanism allows the mapping system to work even in areas with low resources, and the information revealed in aggregate can help governments and aid groups target their relief efforts effectively.[2]
[1] “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Come to the Cartographic Soirée.” The Bus Bench (blog). Accessed via http://www.thebusbench.com/2010/02/cartographicsoir%C3%A9e.html on 4-26-2010; and “How SeeClickFix Works.” SeeClickFix.com. Accessed via http://seeclickfix.com/how_seeclickfix_works on 4-26-2010.
[2] “About.” Ushahidi (website). Accessed via http://www.ushahidi.com/about on 4-26-2010.
The spatialization of commons-based peer-production takes two forms. When a participation framework is used to sample environmental information, the result is crowdsourcing. When a framework is designed to project online content into space, the result is emergent urbanism.
Ushahidi allows people to upload crisis information from a variety of sources including text messages, e-mail, and direct web input. This aggregated data can then be used to direct support and aid.
Although Wikipedia is the best-known crowdsourced website, others directly apply the “wisdom of crowds” to space. Yelp!, for example, allows users to upload information about commercial establishments to the website and score them based on various characteristics like quality, cost, and popularity. The focus of the website is shops and restaurants (and the business model depends on this focus), but people have learned that many kinds of locations and places can be rated, from parks to plazas to bike paths. Numerous similar projects involve crowdsourcing as a means of gathering information about public places. Bench Blog in LA, for example, uses a Google map to document the conditions of LA’s 17,000 bus stops, while SeeClickFix.com provides a mechanism for citizens to report things like pot holes and vandalism to community groups, government, and news media.[1]
Combined with geotagging, the use of GPS or other locative technologies to mark data, crowdsourced information can be used to generate powerful maps. Ushahidi, named for the Swahili word for “testimony”, is an open source mapping framework used to consolidate crisis information and direct aid. Originally developed to map election violence in Kenya in 2008, the platform has since been redeployed in different political crises and, most recently, in response to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Information can be added to Ushahidi’s maps by a variety of methods, including text messages and e-mail. The flexible data input mechanism allows the mapping system to work even in areas with low resources, and the information revealed in aggregate can help governments and aid groups target their relief efforts effectively.[2]
[1] “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Come to the Cartographic Soirée.” The Bus Bench (blog). Accessed via http://www.thebusbench.com/2010/02/cartographicsoir%C3%A9e.html on 4-26-2010; and “How SeeClickFix Works.” SeeClickFix.com. Accessed via http://seeclickfix.com/how_seeclickfix_works on 4-26-2010.
[2] “About.” Ushahidi (website). Accessed via http://www.ushahidi.com/about on 4-26-2010.
Critical Mass, Vancouver, 2009.
Participation Frameworks for Projecting
Designers can also use participatory frameworks to coordinate social action and project ideas or online content into the landscape. In a 2009 article published in Architecture Review Australia in November 2009 and followed-up on his blog “City of Sound,” architect and author Dan Hill ponders “the potential for direct citizen engagement in the development of our cities... with the ‘bottom-up’ processes enabled by the Internet’s platforms increasingly seen as the vehicle for such engagement.” His assessment leads to the concept of emergent urbanism, the “knitting together [of] the everyday loose ends in urban fabric, the parts where individuals can coalesce into small groups and make a difference right away, outside of traditional planning processes that are choked by what coders call ‘cruft’—the extraneous code that creates friction around otherwise elegant structures.”[1]
In many ways, the concept of using social networks to transform a space draws from the tradition of the political demonstration and grassroots organizing, and there are numerous cases when CMC is used to great effect in those cases. Yet digital technologies also introduce new possibilities by virtue of the speed, flexibility, and amplification possibilities that online networks allow.
To see how shared digital resources can create new spatial paradigms of emergent urbanism, it is helpful to consider the model upon which most theorists base their understanding of shared digital media: the commons. The concept of the commons, is a “form of institutional space[] where human agents can act free of the particular constraints required for markets, and where they have some degree of confidence that the resources they need for their plans will be available to them.”[2]
Today, the commons as a shared physical place has been superseded by the concept of the commons as a generic shared resource not necessarily grounded in space. In fact, the “commons” may be most commonly known now as an illustration of Garrett Hardin’s economic concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” when individuals each acting in their own rational interest deplete a shared resource to the detriment of all. Yet with the advent of Wikipedia and other online-based commons showing how the commons need not be a tragedy at all, it has become reasonable to apply arguments about the societal role of the commons in the realm of physical space and its form.
One of the most important projects involving the commons today is Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that has reformed the way that copyright law works on the Internet. As described on their website: “Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the ‘all rights reserved’ concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary ‘some rights reserved’ approach.”
Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford and Harvard and a member of Creative Commons’ board of directors, argues that in terms of copyright law, it is less effective to try and change the law than to try to change practice. Lessig states that the role of the commons can be to change norms and change practices regarding how people share intellectual property, and that changing how people behave can be as effective as changing actual laws.[3]
One powerful example of emergent urbanism is Critical Mass, the coordinated conquering of streets by bicyclists. The original Critical Mass events were organized in an ad hoc fashion with groups of cyclists coordinating their activities via cell phones, e-mails, and blogs. The effect of so many cyclists invading the street had a similar effect to flash mobs: rules governing the use of space were broken and people added new meaning to the urban public realm.
The approach of changing behavior through practice rather than law has been applied to streets by the San Francisco art collective Rebar as well. In 2005, the group fed the meter at a parking spot in San Francisco and inhabited the spot for the day with a temporary public park: it was called “PARK(ing)”. Each year since, more and more parking spots have been converted to parks by independent groups of people around the world, following examples of previous installations shared on PARK(ing) Day’s website. While a small group of citizens may not have the political clout to tackle changing laws regarding the allocation of public land for parking spots versus parks, Rebar and PARK(ing) day demonstrate how introducing new practices can begin to alter social norms regarding public space.[4]
[1] Dan Hill, “Emergent Urbanism or ‘Bottom-Up Planning.’” Cityofsound (blog). Accessed via http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2010/02/emergent-urbanism-or-bottomup-planning.html on 4-26-2010.
[2] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 144.
[3] Lawrence Lessig. “Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right.” Educause Conference November 3-6, 2009. Accessed via http://educause.mediasite.com/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=b84be1d5613841aaae441aac8272e2e7 on 4-26-2010.
[4] Rebar. “PARK(ing) Day”. Accessed via http://www.parkingday.org/ on 5-4-2010.
