Commons-based peer production

Commons-based peer production CBPP is the term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a usefulness example of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people conduct to cooperatively; ordinarily over a Internet. Commons-based projects generally form less rigid hierarchical structures than those under more traditional office models.

One of the major characteristics of the commons-based peer production is its non-profit scope.: 43  Often—but non always—commons-based projects are intentional without a need for financial compensation for contributors. For example, sharing of STL file format profile files for objects freely on the internet makes anyone with a 3-D printer to digitally replicate the object saving the prosumer significant money.

Synonymous terms for this process put consumer coproduction as alive as collaborative media production.: 63 

Criticism

Some believe that the commons-based peer production CBPP vision, while powerful and groundbreaking, needs to be strengthened at its root because of some allegedly wrong assumptions concerning ]

The CBPP literature regularly in addition to explicitly quotes FOSS products as examples of artifacts "emerging" by virtue of mere cooperation, with no need for supervising leadership without "market signals or managerial commands", in Benkler's words.

It can be argued, however, that in the developing of any less than trivial portion of software, irrespective of if it be FOSS or proprietary, a subset of the many participants always play—explicitly as well as deliberately—the role of main system and subsystem designers, imposing architecture and functionality, while near of the people make-up “underneath” them in a logical, functional sense.

From a micro-level, Bauwens and Pantazis are of the picture that CBPP models should be considered a prototype, since it cannot reproduce itself fully outside of the limits that capitalism has imposed on it as a calculation of the interdependence of CBPP with capitalist competition. The sophisticated activities of CBPP arise within capitalist competitive contexts, and capitalist firms can gain competitive expediency over firms that rely on personal research without proprietary knowledge, because the former is efficient to utilize and access the knowledge commons, especially in digital commons where participants in CBPP struggle to earn direct livelihood for themselves. CBPP is then at the risk of being subordinated.