Closed drozas closed 9 years ago
Title: Researching P2Pvalue (1): Interview with researcher Karthik Iyer URL: blog/researching-p2pvalue-1-interview-researcher-karthik-iyer
(This interview by Michel Bauwens originally appeared on the P2P Foundation blog on 28/12/2014)
The P2P Foundation participates in a EU-funded research project on value in contributory communities called P2P Value.
Here is a frist interview with a researcher connected to the P2P Foundation network, Karthik Iyer:
"1. Can you re-introduce the P2P Value project to our readers and explain your part in it ? What stage is the research in right now ?
The P2P Value project is an ambitious European research project that aims to understand the way in which value is created and exchanged in peer 2 peer communities and projects. The goal is also to use the findings to build a techno social platform that can facilitate better collaboration through greater value creation and sharing in communities.
The project is organized in work packages and we just completed the first major milestone which is creating a well laid out theoritical foundation backed by some test cases
2. How has the project, and your part in it, defined value, and how does it specifically apply to peer production communities ? What are the various measures of value in p2p ? Do you see any major change in the interpretation of value, in the period before the emergence of such communities and the period after its emergence ?
The P2P Value project has given me an interesting forum to understand the various ways in which value can be created which fundamentally differs from non p2p modes of production and distribution. For example Value when ones goes into an understanding of what Value is or what value can be one realizes that the answer is not as straight forward, If we start with the premise that “Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.
So from this premise value could be understood based on motivations for creation and consumption. From the context of this research two fundamental questions of value can be understood based on 1) Why are certain cbpp projects created ? and 2) why do people choose to participate in them ?
* Value Creation:
Motivations for creation could be analyzed based on political, economic, social, legal and technological dimensions
Political dimension : Creating new projects to control a technology , for example creating open derivatives of closed source platforms such as windows and office for low end disruption. FSF and OSI creating software based on divergent political motivations. CBPP creates value also through new markets disruption by targeting new segments where existing models do not want to create value (for example chrome books and linux software for low end computers which would destroy the wintel nexus)
Economic : The literature around the economic value dimension in CBPP deals with reduction of transaction costs and labour costs through open innovationleveraging network effects and to generate economies of scale and scope.
Social : Market mechanisms fail in a multitude of ways to provide people with the necessary products or services, so cbpp as a means for social production could add value by overcoming some of these limitations. The literature around governance by Ostrom is applicable, the value of non-excludability improves network effects, and social production could bring about governance measures that could enhance the fate of the commons .
Technological : The technological value of the commons is its ability to capture bottom up inputs for new innovation, the literature of is very relevant to describe how the commons improves technological innovation. Hal Varian descrbes in information rules that technological value as Reward = (Total value added to the industry) * (Our share of industry value), i.e. that commons increases the overall value in the industry and also enhances the organization that opens its technology to the industry.
Legal : The value in the legal dimension is creating a commons license that avoids lockins and creating a common pool resources that are both extendable and maleable. The literature around licensing and its role in forking and providing an open platforms is relevant to this dimension. Especially the work of Coleman 2009.
* Participation and value consumption :
Fundamentally value consumption can be can be understood based on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for participation in CBPP. Here participant could also be an end user as he is part of the ecology spreading the reach and understanding of a technology and facilitating network externalities.
Intrinsic motivation and value : The literature around value consumption based on intrinsic motivations deals with drivers such as need for a particular software solution , home ludens payoff (the works of Lakhani and Wolf 2005; Bates et al. 2002; Shah 2006; Hars and Ou 2001 delves into greater details) gift culture (the works of Hars and Ou 2002 exemplifies how this is sustainable) and social standing, the paper by Bitzer and Schrettl 2004 is very relevant to this discussion.
Extrinsic motivation and value : Various papers have been written around extrinsic motivation and value consumption in the commons. Some of the notable factors are to make a profit by selling the software one day (Lakhani and Wolf 2005) , to gain financial benefits (Hertel et al. 2003) , to improve future job prospects (Bates et al. 2002; Ghosh et al. 2002; Hars and Ou 2001) and to signal capability to potential employers (Lerner and Tirole 2004).
3. What have you learned from the work of the other researchers in the project ? Any highlights you like to share with our readers ?
The P2P value project is a beautiful congregation of diverse minds, I especially liked the works of Adam Arvidsson, Primavera de Fillipi and Melanie Dulong. They each brought a very different perspective on value from a political economics, legal and technological point of view, which reiterated the fact that future value regimes will have to encapsulate these different aspects of P2P for communities to succeed.
4. One of the aims of this project was to design guidelines promote greater collaboration in a p2p environment ? why should this be different from traditional projects ?
In traditional projects the notion of value is unidimensional and is often related to economic benefits. In P2P projects the motivations for participation and the nature of collaboration is much more than money or in a physical environment as described in the previous sections. So unless a techno social platform encpaulates the true nature and aspirations of its participants (which is quiet different from traditional projects) it will continue to be less efficient in terms of scaling and outreach, a majority of p2p projects fail due to this."
Title: Researching P2Pvalue (2): Ignasi Capdevila on P2Pvalue and Surveying P2P Communities
Body:
(This interview by Michel Bauwens originally appeared on the P2P Foundation blog on 31/01/2015)
P2Pvalue is an EU funded research project investigating value creation in P2P communities and exploring what powers P2P collaboration. The P2P Foundation is a partner in the project. Each month we feature an interview with members of the research team. Last month Karthik Iyer spoke with us about how notions of value in collaborative communities differ from more traditional conceptions of value as measured in monetary terms.
This month we feature Ignasi Capdevila on surveying P2P communities.
Michel Bauwens: What was your research about in the P2Pvalue project? What were your goals?
Ignasi Capdevila: The P2Pvalue project is a European research project that involves several research centers and organizations. My work for the P2P Foundation consisted on designing and running a survey of CBPP community members (CBPP stands for Commons-Based Peer Production).
The main goal of the survey was to provide the P2Pvalue techno-social platform with design guidelines to define the features that would be the most useful to fulfill the needs of CBPP community members.
To do so, the survey intended to study CBPP communities that mainly interact online (i.e. in the case of FLOSS projects) but also communities that have a face-to-face interaction and that share their collectively created output in a digital platform (i.e. like is the case of some hackerspaces, makerspaces, fab labs, coworking spaces, etc.).
I am particularly interested in these types of ‘offline’ communities of makers and coworkers because they provide us a new way of understanding how work can be organized without formal organizations (like for instance, corporate structures). They can also be illustrative of how peer production can be implemented in the brick-and-mortar world. So far peer production has been studied in online collaborative projects, like Wikipedia or Linux. I felt that it was important to include communities with a strong offline interaction to strengthen the notion of peer production.
Michel Bauwens: What are the key findings of the survey?
Ignasi Capdevila: The survey analyzed value creation and value capture at different levels (individual, community and society) in three different communities:
1) Online virtual communities;
2) Communities supported by digital platforms but with a local focus and a face-to-face interaction;
3) Localized communities with face-to-face interaction.
In total, 234 answers to the survey were considered for the analysis, representing 158 CBPP communities.
The first goal of the survey was to provide the P2Pvalue platform with design guidelines. The results of the survey can be summarized following three axes:
1) Offline interaction: it is important to manage the offline interactions of members beyond the use of online tools;
2) Tools for sharing and collaborating: Even in digital interaction, socializing represents an important part of the dedication. It appears also important to share the created value with the society in general;
3) Open content and value distribution: users find it valuable to have different possible options to allow or impede commercialization of the output by the community or third parties.
The second research question was to determine to which extent communities other than virtual communities can be identified as CBPP communities. The results suggest that other types of communities whose interaction is rather localized show comparable CBPP characteristics as virtual communities.
Michel Bauwens: What are the different notions about value that were considered in your study?
Ignasi Capdevila: Value is subjective, so we have to consider who is evaluating it. One of the premises is that value depends on the individual’s judgment, contrary to price, that is an objective figure. We are dealing with the subjectivity of value creation. Each participant will identify the value created differently depending on their initial motivations or expectations when joining the community. For instance, a participant looking mainly to have fun, will consider that his participation in the community is valuable if he/she effectively is having fun. So, we have to consider the motivations to construct the different categories of value creation. It is also important to consider personal and collective narratives when trying to assess value creation in communities.
The question of value has been fundamental in management. Recursive questions in the management literature are: 1) How much economic value does a firm create? and 2) Who captures that value?
Many scholars have addressed these questions conceptually. However, the concept of value has been considered quite narrowly, mainly in relation with traditional for-profit organizations. Considering new productive organizations such as in CBPP communities calls for a reconsideration of the concepts of what value is, and its implications in the concepts of value creation and value capture.
Management researchers have often taken a too narrow view, assimilating value creation with returns to shareholders. Efforts to expand the scope of analysis to other stakeholders have been ad hoc, addressing returns potentially captured by employees, suppliers or customers, but in a manner that has not been comprehensive or complete. Furthermore, the focus of value creation as economic returns has ignored the value exchange among stakeholders.
Michel Bauwens: You differentiate the concepts of value creation and value capture. In which aspects are they different?
Ignasi Capdevila: According to the traditional economic concept of value, a firm creates value when it produces and delivers a good or a service at a cost that is lower than what the consumer is willing to pay.
Typically, firms capture the value created in the form of profits that follow the selling of the products and services. In parallel, consumers capture the value created by the firm by enjoying the products to the extent that the price they have paid is inferior than their maximum willingness to pay. Thus, in economic terms, the total value created is equal to the sum of the producer and the consumer surplus.
The neoclassical economic view on value is based on a zero-sum concept of value. According to this view, the value that is captured by the producer is value that is subtracted from the one captured by the customer. And the other way round. In other words, there will be imperatively a winner and a looser of value.
But there are some important limitations to the simplistic traditional views on value. Traditionally, value capture has been considered in the literature exclusively in economic terms. Other forms of value have been largely ignored. The difficulty to measure value other than monetary might have influenced this lack of research. As Albert Einstein once said: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
In our study, by considering a notion of value that goes beyond the economic dimension, the limitations of the classic concept of value are overcome:
Firstly, value can be captured by any stakeholder. The notion of producer as antagonist of consumer is too simplistic to understand the value dynamics in CBPP. In peer production, consumers and producers are not differentiated actors. On the contrary, both aspects are confounded as consumers can be producers simultaneously. In this context, the concepts of “produsage” (Bruns 2008) and “prosumer” (Ritzer et al. 2012) make sense.
Secondly, in CBPP, the collectively produced result of collaboration is shared as commons. The value created is rarely economic. As a consequence, collectively-created products shared as commons might represent a value capture by different actors simultaneously, avoiding the risk of competing for the value capture between actors.
Ignasi Capdevila is a PhD Candidate at HEC Montréal, where he is a current member of MosaiC, the Creativity & Innovation Hub. He has worked for more than twelve years in the automotive industry in Spain, France, Germany and Sweden as responsible for the development of new products and as head of the department of new projects. Ignasi holds two engineer diplomas, from UPC (Spain) and INPL (France), and a MBA from ESADE Business School. His research interests include localized knowledge creation and transfer, knowledge communities, creativity and innovation management in organizations and cities.
Hi @cataspanglish!
I got copies of the html at
If there are any more changes until Nigel deploys the changes, let me know and I will track them here.
Also gathered - http://www.p2pvalue.eu/blog/barcelona-caps-infoday-roundup
(This post is based on the report at IGOPnet by Mayo Fuster Morell)
The CAPS Infoday took place at FabLabBCN in Barcelona on February 9th 2015.
CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation”) is a call for funding projects under the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission. The event was coordinated by IGOPnet.cc/P2Pvalue (Mayo Fuster Morell) and organized by the several European projects in Barcelona (D-CENT and CONFINE), and hosted by FabLabBCN. 100 people attended the event.
In the first session, Loretta Anania (CAPS officer) presented the CAPS call during which an extended session of answer and questions around CAPS funding took place. Questions such as the type of license of the projects, or a good composition for the consortium were addressed.
In the second session, several projects funded under the first call of CAPS were presented.
P2PVALUE
P2Pvalue project was presented by Mayo Fuster Morell of IGOPnet.cc. Fuster Morell provided an overview of the project and data on the extended research on collaborative production resulting from the project first year. Data such as which is the overall budget of social innovations project, governance models of collaborative projects or which are the conditions that favor value creation.
D-CENT
D-CENT another CAPS project already funded was presented by David Laniado (Barcelona Media). Laniado provided an overview of the project and explained its main achievements. D-CENT is creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. Together with citizens and developers, D-CENT is creating a decentralised social networking platform for large-scale collaboration and decision-making. Slides are available here.
CONFINE
CONFINE – another European project in line with CAPS spirit – was presented by Leandro Navarro (Politecnic University of Catalonia). CONFINE promotes the integration of large community networks in Europe. Slides are available here.
Monica Garriga (from IGOPnet.cc) also provided an example of community experiment – CitizensSqKm – part of CONFINE growing under community networks wireless insfrastructure. Garriga’s slides.
SOM CONNEXIO – Local experience
Local experiences – not funded by CAPS – but that provide of example of CAPS type of projects were also present. Mercè Botella presented Som Connexió. A cooperative for communication sovereignty.
FAB LAB – Local event host
Last but not least. The local hoster of the CAPS Infoday was presented. Tomas Diez provided an introduction of the Fab Labs movement and the case of Barcelona Fab Lab, the first Fab Lab to appear and become known internationally.
A lively discussion followed.
The day ended up with networking events in order to present and discuss ideas for the next CAPS call.
Slides
Insight storytelling for building re-use
Thanks to Mayo Fuster Morell for coordinating the event.
Thank you to Laura del Castillo and Jorge Salcedo for the support organizing the event. Thanks to FabLabBCN for hosting.
The videos were recorded by Chris Pinchen.
Track contents to re-add manually, added during the freezing stage