This was the very first academic conference exclusively devoted to peer production, and to my mind, it has therefore a ‘historic’ importance. We already know that it will be held again next year, though at a different place, so this will also be the start of a peer to peer research movement that will likely grow in the future.

Stefan Merten already wrote up his personal experience on the Oekonux mailing list:

“I’m just returning from this nice workshop in Nottingham which has been organized by Andreas Wittel and Michel / P2PFoundation.

This time I will not tell much about the single contributions because Michel will set up a page on P2PFoundation where all the slides will be put (though most probably are PowerPoint 🙁 ). I think in many cases the slides or papers will suffice to get an idea. However, a couple of interesting questions came up which I will pose here on this list in a series of additional postings.

The workshop itself was really nice. There were a very good atmosphere and since Andreas arranged the location and food and so on the framework was set up for a really nice meeting. The people who have been there where very much interested in discussion, learning and understanding things – very similar to the atmosphere in Oekonux 🙂 .

There were about 30 persons (all invited) but unfortunately the workshop was not public so for non-invited persons it was not possible to attend. Also there were in total 6 persons who are here on this list or closely associated 🙂 .

There were only one track which had the advantage that the whole group was together all the time but had the disadvantage that there were a constant hurry during the presentations and the discussions – which I found quite disturbing.

In my presentation I used the term Selbstentfaltung – in it’s German spelling and pronunciation. It came quite unexpected that several people independent from each other approached me and found it very useful to use this term – because in English it doesn’t mean anything and you can fill it with meaning matching exactly the phenomenons we see.

At the end of the workshop there were some common understanding that

* peer production is an important issue,

* there is something like a special peer mode of production

* collaboration generally becomes more important

* individual improvement does not come on the expense of others

We were not able to find (sharp) disagreements.

Several issues have been identified which need further consideration /
research:

* Peer production

* Peer governance

* Peer practice

* Peer property

I had also a couple of talks with various persons and a 4th Oekonux Conference became more likely than ever 🙂 .

A couple of small things I’m bringing back from the workshop I’d like to share here.

Michel told us that there is a quite vibrant Free Design community at

http://appropedia.com/

I were not able to check it myself but it contains designs for appropriate technology. Michel also mentioned that it is certainly not
dominated by Western people. Also the absolute quality and use value orientation of the designs has been emphasized – just what we analyzed here for this type of production process.

Another Free Project was pointed to by Paul B. Hertzog. He told us that the science fiction community has an interesting project
producing lots of texts. Unfortunately I have no URL for it 🙁 .

The last thing I want to put in this mail is the clear distinction Adam Arvidsson made between a capitalist economy and what he called “ethical economy” (I put it in quotes because I think “ethical” is one of the worst attributes one can choose – it has not much to do with ethics…). His base finding is that the capitalist economy valorizes what is produced in the “ethical economy”. This is probably what also has happened in many sectors of culture since the beginning of capitalism. He also remarked that the problem for the “ethical economy” is not talent – there is much of it. It is more the problem of organizing and maintaining communities around that talent.