From a discussion on the Oekonux mailing list (list-en), Christian Siefkes refers to an important aspect of peer production projects, i.e. their stigmergic aspects, which allow to coordinate work through impersonal messaging of what needs to be done.

Christian Siefkes:

“A hinting system also serves as an informal mechanism for prioritizing tasks: the more people care for a task, the more likely it is to be picked up by somebody (since the corresponding hints tend to become more visible and explicit, and since people are more likely to pick up a task they wish to be done).

Hints are impersonal, they give people a chance to look around what is there to do and then to decide for themselves. In peer projects there are no “overseers” that can tell people what to do—people decide for themselves.

Francis Heylighen doesn’t use “hint” in the narrow sense. Every missing feature of a program that you notice is a hint indicating how/where this software could be enhanced; every bug is a hint indicating where it needs to be improved. Whenever you discover and report abug, or whenever you discover it and submit a patch for it (which I have done quite often), you have followed a hint which the developers of the program left (though they didn’t leave it intentionally).”

Example:

“I’m on the mailing list of a medium-size free software project [1] and there are regularly (not frequently, but from time to time) mails from people asking “I like the software and I would like to contribute, what can I do?” (or “I’m using the software and would like to give something back, what can I do?”) Then somebody points them to the task list [2], and, if they have the energy to follow this up, they self-select themselves for a task. Of course, there are also people who come up with their own ideas (with about the same frequency, I would guess), but even they typically refer to the agenda or the goals of the project.”