Peer production is responsible for some of the most valuable online resources, challenging the authority of firms, markets, and government bureaucracies.
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In 1991, a Finnish graduate student in computer science named Linus Torvalds sent a brief announcement to an online discussion group, saying he had been working on parts of a new operating system in his spare time. Torvalds described his project as “just a hobby [that] won’t be big and professional” and insisted that it would be free to use, study, modify, and distribute. Torvalds was building a technically challenging piece of software called an operating system “kernel,” which handles the most basic functions related to communication between a computer’s hardware and software. Unlike past operating system projects, Torvalds invited feedback and contributions from anyone on the Internet.
Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold, and Aaron Shaw coauthored “Peer Production,” from which this article is adapted.
With time, Torvalds’ kernel attracted other developers who worked with him to turn the hobby project into an established piece of software that the group called “Linux.” This team combined their new kernel with another Internet-based collaborative project, GNU, whose goal was to create a replacement for the UNIX operating system but which had not yet produced a usable kernel. The result was the GNU/Linux operating system.
More than 30 years later, GNU/Linux (or just “Linux,” as most people call it) runs on billions of computers worldwide and has become one of the most important pieces of software in history. Nearly all supercomputers, a large majority of Internet servers, a majority of smartphones, and a growing number of “embedded systems” in devices like televisions run some version of Linux. In all of these markets, Linux did not simply fill an empty niche. Rather, it displaced many proprietary server operating systems from major manufacturers at the time, including Sun Microsystems, HP, and IBM.
Linux’s success upended the prevailing wisdom about how to build software. In the 1980s and 1990s, most world-class software was written by large, hierarchically managed teams of developers within immense, multinational corporations such as AT&T and Microsoft. Software developers worked full time for these companies and were well paid. The companies retained vast legal teams who used restrictive copyright licenses, proprietary patents, and technological measures to ensure that none of the code their developers wrote could ever be used — or, in most cases, even seen — by anyone outside the firm.
Linux took nearly every aspect of this proprietary software development approach and threw it out the window. The Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux operating system were built by volunteers collaborating outside firms, without hierarchical management structures, without money as the primary incentive, and without the typical legal or technical arrangements to restrict access, adaptation, or reuse of the underlying source code. The vast majority of early Linux contributors only wrote small amounts of code. But despite this unusual production model, Linux’s high quality and growing market share were undeniable by the end of the 1990s.
Linux took nearly every aspect of proprietary software development and threw it out the window.
Since then, Linux has inspired millions of attempts to build knowledge goods in a similarly open and collaborative manner. The most famous is the free, collaboratively produced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Like Linux, Wikipedia began with an open call for volunteer contributions to “an encyclopedia that anyone can edit” in January 2001. Wikipedia includes about 68 million articles across more than 300 different language editions. In the English-language version alone, the articles were built from more than a billion distinct contributions, or “edits,” by more than 121 million user accounts and many millions of anonymous contributors. Nearly all of these edits are from volunteers. Today, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world and the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia in history by nearly every metric.
The collaborative production model that underlies Linux and Wikipedia has also been used thousands of times at a smaller scale.
For example, while preparing his syllabus for a class in 2011, a law professor named Andreas Fischer-Lescano stumbled upon dubious passages in the doctoral thesis of the German politician and then-Minister of Defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Fischer-Lescano searched the Internet and discovered that they had been copied from other sources without credit. In February 2011, a Twitter user raised the issue and asked for help with a thorough analysis of zu Guttenberg’s dissertation. Many volunteers joined GuttenPlag Wiki — a participatory online platform created for that purpose — and within a couple of days, hundreds of pages of zu Guttenberg’s thesis were marked up with detailed documentation of apparent plagiarism in many places. About two weeks later, zu Guttenberg resigned from all political offices in light of the incriminating findings.
Although radically different in terms of size, scale, and scope, Linux, Wikipedia, and GuttenPlag Wiki are all examples of what you might call “commons-based peer production,” a term coined in the early 2000s by a law professor named Yochai Benkler.
Drawing on Benkler’s work, we propose a new definition of peer production. We hold that these projects must do four things:
- Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently, if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
- Be decentralized in that they are collectively self-governed and organized by participants.
- Be decentralized in terms of how tasks are executed.
- Create content that is protected as part of the public commons.
Peer production projects may be similar to markets in that they rely on the distributed, self-directed actions of individuals to create information and other kinds of goods. However, _un_like markets, peer production involves neither financial incentives nor prices nor exclusive property regimes. And unlike firms or government organizations, peer production involves neither contractual obligations, pre-defined work plans, nor hierarchical forms of management and task assignment. While some people may contribute to peer production as part of their job, many do so as volunteers. When people do engage in peer production as part of their jobs, employers usually do not dictate the type of peer production work they pursue.
It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
According to classical economic wisdom, if you want people to collaborate and efficiently distribute the outputs of that collaboration, the best way to do so is through private, for-profit firms that sell goods or services in an open market. Firms hire and pay employees who are then contractually bound to pursue the work assigned to them by managers. The products of the work these employees do become company property, which sets their price, manages sales transactions, and distributes salaries and any profits generated along the way.
In theory, these techniques address the challenges of aligning incentives, organizing tasks, and ensuring that the resulting outputs are distributed to those willing and able to pay for them.
But peer production represents an alternative to the behavioral models at the heart of classical economic wisdom. Neither contractual obligations, financial incentives, nor bureaucratic authority ensures that participants contribute their work or that the work is organized effectively. The resulting products are public commons protected as non-exclusive (rather than private) forms of intellectual property. This means that peer-produced resources cannot be priced directly on the open market.
In its Platonic ideal, peer production projects retain complete collective, autonomous control over the scope of their work, the legitimacy of their leaders’ authority, and the selection of tasks worth pursuing. In practice, though, peer production is often employed to varying degrees — by institutions that do not neatly check all the definitional boxes.
Peer production represents an alternative to the behavioral models at the heart of classical economic wisdom.
Take, for example, a site like Reddit. On Reddit, people join topically defined subcommunities, or subreddits, where they voluntarily share information in “posts,” then vote on and comment on those posts. The aggregation — also known as collaborative filtering — of the voting and commenting activity produces a collective sense of what’s most interesting or important. Thinking back to our definition above of peer production, we would say that Reddit relies on diverse nonmonetary motivations and decentralized goal-setting and execution, but the products have always been formally controlled by Reddit’s corporate owners (i.e., not a commons).
Reddit’s owners initially adopted a very permissive attitude toward data redistribution and reuse that made Reddit function like a commons. Over time, however, this changed as Reddit prepared for its initial public offering (IPO) in 2024. AI companies engaged in bulk collection and reuse of Reddit data, raising the financial stakes and introducing threats to the site’s viewership and engagement. In Spring 2023, Reddit’s owners restricted access to their data and began charging for it, making the site much less commons-like and provoking a backlash among some of the most committed volunteer contributors.
Online sites and services like Yelp and YouTube have similarly eroded the boundaries between markets and peer production. On these platforms, participants contribute content for free while others are compensated through advertising revenues, product placement, or access to private events. In cases like Airbnb, private companies profit from an activity (hosting guests through “couchsurfing”) that was previously managed in a non-monetized way by a peer-production community offering nearly identical services, such as Couchsurfing and Hospitality Club. Airbnb is not peer production, but it also seems unlikely that it could have existed without peer production to show it the way.
When you really think about peer production at its most basic level, you might ask: What is a bunch of unpaid volunteers doing at the heart of the modern commercial Internet? How do these volunteers get anything done if nobody is in charge and nobody pays them for their work? Why should we trust anything these communities create to support so many fundamental parts of our digital lives?
These are, fundamentally, some of the most core questions in the field.
After all, despite all the fanfare about “the wisdom of crowds,” collaborative production on the Internet remains both rare and challenging. For every example of a peer-produced product, there are many unsuccessful attempts to build a collaborative community. Many of these failed efforts to build communities produced valuable knowledge commons in their own right. For example, in a study of software commons, Charles Schweik and Robert English found that a large portion of successful software commons — nearly half — only involve a single developer writing code on their own and sharing it with the world. In other words, many software commons are entirely uncollaborative.
You might ask: How do these volunteers get anything done if nobody is in charge?
As peer production communities have matured, they have also encountered challenges and limitations. Broadly speaking, peer production has advanced most rapidly in the Global North and tends to reflect the demographic attributes and interests of the wealthiest and most digitally literate. Inside communities, hierarchies and power relations have emerged, and sexism and harassment can be widespread. Additionally, projects that grow tend to become more formalized, resulting in open communities that are, at the same time, highly structured, bureaucratic organizations. Even when communities welcome newcomers, arriving volunteers often meet multiple obstacles that effectively exclude all but the most highly educated and Internet-savvy individuals.
Nevertheless, peer production has continued to shape the world in both direct and indirect ways. As wikis, distributed software development, and related modes of online collaboration have become more widespread, they have influenced how more traditional organizations structure themselves. This includes the so-called “sharing economy,” crowdfunding, distributed computing, user-generated content production on commercial platforms such as YouTube and Yelp, hacking and fabrication spaces in the DIY movement, social media systems, and even blockchain-based technologies such as cryptocurrencies. Generative artificial intelligence systems and digital assistants, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, answer questions using data from peer-produced sources.
When Linux was released, not even its authors foresaw the emergence of peer production, nor could they have imagined that anyone would still be writing about their work decades later. But now, at a time when many of the world’s most powerful companies and governments struggle with misinformation, declining civic participation, and growing social divisions, peer production offers an alternative model for addressing these new challenges.
Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist and technologist; Christian Pentzold is Professor and Chair of Media and Communications in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Leipzig University; and Aaron Shaw is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University. They coauthored “Peer Production,” from which this article is adapted.
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