Title: Mutual benefit digital goods
Author: Philip Serracino Inglott
Date submitted: 2011
Submission status: three peer reviews delivered to author; author elected not to resubmit
Summary: Extending the grounding ideologies of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) beyond the domain of software faces a particular hurdle: many digital things have no equivalent of “source code” to speak of. One approach to dealing with this is to focus on the method of production. Thus non-software digital things which are peer-produced (following the Open Source methodology for example) are presumed to be inscribed with the same ideologies as FLOSS. What does Wikipedia have in common with Linux, besides the facts that both are (cost) free and are produced by a voluntary community? Moreover this word ‘open’ is used very freely in such terms as Open Access publishing, Open Educational Resources, Open Standards, etc. which all seem to share some basic notions. But a scholarly article, even if published as Open Access, is not community produced. Several important FLOSS tools are not community produced, even if by being Open Source they could be. This suggests that the commonality that brings all these digital things together, and provides for a prima facie impression of online freedom, lies beyond the specific technicalities of their production. Benkler and Nissenbaum have pointed out how what they call “Commons-based Peer Production” of digital goods embodies virtues. I contend that the shared nature of various online technologies that are ‘open’ or depend on some sort of crowdsourcing can be found in the virtues they embody. I would like to present an alternative approach to discerning those digital goods which have the same desirable ethico-political virtues as FLOSS, based on the possibilities for action that are afforded to the user by such things.2011Reviewed; Author elected not to resubmit

Title: Disentangling collaborative production: one definition and four types
Author: Mariano Zukerfeld
Date submitted: 2011
Submission status: three peer reviews delivered to author; author elected not to resubmit
Summary: Many concepts have sprung in the last fifteen years to describe a bunch of particular ways of organizing productive processes of informational goods: “Bazaar Model” (Raymond, 1997), “Non-command cooperation” (Vidal, 2000), “User generated content or user created content” (OECD, 2007), “Peer to Peer Production, P2P” (Bauwens, 2006), “Commons Based Peer Production” (Benkler, 2005); “Collaborative production” or “Mode of production of intellectual commons” (Vercelli, 2006, 2009). The first objective of this paper is to provide a systematic and unifying definition of the phenomenon. The second objective is to characterize various types of  “Collaborative Production” which are usually confused. In order to do this, two variables related to the productive processes are taken into account: a) Are enterprises involved? b) Is there an actor who controls the platform for the collaboration? As a result of grouping empirical examples –some well known, some obscure- around these questions, four kinds of collaborative production came out: Public non-state Collaborative Production, ii) Mixed Collaborative Production, iii) Capitalist Collaborative Production and iv) Statist Collaborative Production. This classification allows us to distinguish that some features of the categories i) and, to some extent, ii) are those which are commonly identified with the whole collaborative production. However, the modalities iii) and iv) need both public attention and urgent regulatory efforts.