Session 5: Social knowledge production and services: Peer production in online environments vs. in-person collaboration

For this session I choose discuss on “Peer production in online environments vs. in-person collaboration” as I am impressed by the success of Wikipedia

The peer production of open source software development is very successful. It shows that the networked communication can build individual contributions into collective, synergistic projects without intervention from formal institutions or dependence on conventional expertise. Generating from the Open Source software development, “Linus’s Law” (Raymond, 1998) appears. It states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” That is any problem is ultimately trivial in software development where, according to this law, the number of people contributing to a project provides a useful indication of its quality. Paul Graham claims that “The method of ensuring quality” in peer production. That is: the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored” (Graham, 2005).

All the laws based on the assumption: more people making more changes only make things better. That is numbers and time work in favor of quality. In many cases they may, but in some they appear not to. Open Source software is for the developers which is easier to work in a networked communication environment, but ordinary users are quite unlike developers. It is difficult to transfer from Open Source software which produced mostly by developers to a project involved contributions from ordinary people like Wikipedia.

Do these laws can be extended to all peer productions ? How we guarantee that the good stuff remains and not the bad remain? here comes the boundary of these laws.

1. Freedom of speech is not the same as the freedom to replace other’s versions of the truth with your own.
2. Though many eyeballs survey a project and many hands update it, work on the system is not necessarily distributed equally. Hot topic, of course attracts more eyeballs. So Wikipedia limits the trust it puts in “improvement” in the quotation above to “widely circulated articles”.
   

With all of these constrains, many huge distributed projects are produced online, Wikipedia is one of the very successful peer productions in online environment. What Wikipedia impressed me most is that: it reports the daily news and update on every topic (see screenshot for example.) As an ordinary user, you can easily grab the new developments in your interested areas and as a developer, you can post your contributions easily.

For the in person cooperation, the group can focus on more specific topic. The group members are less variety than the online communities. They are easier to get agreement on the topic and produce a consistent project while the online peer production may constantly change. What is flawed today may be flawless tomorrow. But the in person cooperation are limited by the frequencies the member meet and the place they are located. Not many people can join the cooperation. It’s difficult to produce complex and large project. The in person cooperation can be improved greatly by online tools, like email etc. With the help of online tools, more people can join the cooperation, not just the people who can meet face to face.

So we can say the best way is the combination of peer production and in person cooperation. But there are some boundary on the varieties of the cooperation people. Beyond the threshold, more cooperation may not bring in high quality result. As more and more people join the cooperation, we face the same problems of the quantitative assessments and the qualitative judgments people tend to make.