<nettime> P2P Foundation: A Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy (new book)

["Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Bwo Michel Bauwens

* Report: A Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy. By Michel
Bauwens, Nicolas Mendoza and Franco Iacomella, et al. Orange Labs and
P2P Foundation, 2012.

URL = http://p2p.coop/files/reports/collaborative-economy-2012.pdf

Summary via:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Synthetic_Overview_of_the_Collaborative_Economy

"Chapter One creates a frame of understanding with some general
characteristics of the whole field. In order to do this, it attempts
to create a general grammar to ease the understanding of the varied
phenomena that will be discussed in the rest of the report. It tries
to uncover the fundamental drives and explains the basic
interconnected concepts. It ends with a first approach to a
categorization of the different expressions of the collaborative
economy.

Chapter Two looks at user innovation dynamics, and describes how the
corporate world has answered their challenge. We examine the emerging
figures of the more active 'user' which replaces the traditional
figure of the consumer, and sociological categories such as the
professional amateur and the lead user. The chapter describes how
corporations have adapted by initializing open innovation and by
integrating practices for co-design and co-creation of value in their
own value chains. We also look at the more independent user-generated
media practices, which have been facilitated with the emergence of
social media.

In Chapter Three we look at two of the new 'diagonal' or 'hybrid'
approaches. These hybrids combine entrepreneurship with more
horizontal participation, and deepen of the mutualization of both
skills and materials. In the case of crowdsourcing, firms appeal to
the crowd for both creative/innovative input and for more
service-oriented tasks; we try to make sense of this complex ecology.
We also look at the emergence of collaborative consumption, in which
physical resources and services are mutualized, in order to mobilize
hitherto underutilized idle resources. Practices of mutualization
characteristic to collaborative consumption also to render existing
services more ecologically efficient, as for example in car sharing.
We are witnessing here a more profound shift: from ownership to
access: this is, access to a wide variety of services. We look at the
new possibilities for (dis)intermediation that it generates, but also
at the peer to peer marketplaces that it enables.

In Chapter Four we look at the more radical community-centric
production methods, i.e. the emergence of commons-based peer
production, where participating firms have to adapt more stringently
to the rules and norms of the initiating communities. After defining
peer production, we look at the various ways in which community and
corporate dynamics interpenetrate to create a 17dynamic field of
hybrid economies. We also look at the cultural penetration of these
new practices and the current shift of their reach from the more
immaterial creation of knowledge and code, to actual physical
production through the sharing of designs, as is emerging in the
fields of open hardware and distributed manufacturing.

In Chapter Five, we look at the infrastructural underpinnings which
enable the new forms of distributed production. These range from the
very material development of personal fabrication and 3D printing
machines culminating in new possibilities for microfactories, but also
distributed funding, new accounting and metric systems to measure
distributed development, and new hybrid legal forms. These new hybrid
legal forms integrate for-profit and non-profit motives, with more
potential to generate contributing communities.

Chapter Six is an overview of 'open' (i.e. based on shared
intellectual property) and community-based business and monetization
models. It answers the crucial question of financial sustainability in
the absence of strong IP-based rent income."



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