Towards a (De)centralisation-Based Typology of Peer Production

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay (1) , Francesca Musiani (1)

1 ISCC - Institut des Sciences de la Communication du CNRS

Online peer-production platforms facilitate the coordination of creative work and services. Generally considered as empowering participatory tools and a source of common good, they can also be, however, alienating instruments of digital labour. This paper proposes a typology of peer-production platforms, based on the centralisation/decentralisation levels of several of their design features. Between commons-based peer-production and crowdsourced, user-generated content " enclosed " by corporations, a wide range of models combine different social, political, technical and economic arrangements. This combined analysis of the level of (de)centralisation of platform features provides information on emancipation capabilities in a more granular way than a market-based qualification of platforms, based on the nature of ownership or business models only. The five selected features of the proposed typology are: ownership of means of production, technical architecture/design, social organization/governance of work patterns, ownership of the peer-produced resource, and value of the output.

Mots clés: Peer production; P2P; Platforms; Distributed Architectures; Ownership; Governance; Design; Copyright; Commons

Domaines: Science politique; Droit; Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Francesca Musiani. Towards a (De)centralisation-Based Typology of Peer Production. Triple C - Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 2016, 14 (1), pp.189-207. ⟨halshs-01303288⟩