P2P FOUNDATION, THAILAND
Online presence through Wiki and blog A wiki is a very simple collaborative technology where a community collectively collaborate to work on pages and a blog is much more of a journal, as it publishes individual entries in a linear fashion
Introduction The Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation) is a global cyber-collective and advocacy group that researches, documents, and promotes peer to peer alternatives in all domains of social life. It believes that the emerging social forms of peer production, peer governance, and peer property, are a fundamental social advancement, that its weaknesses and pitfalls have to be studied with care, and that it may prove to a social logic that is superior to for-profit production. The story of setting up of an online presence to influence the emerging debate on peer production goes like this; “our technological tools were very simple, and had to be very cheap to maintain, and easy to use, as we are a community of volunteers with no organisational budget so far. The Wiki was set up in November 2005, the blog in February 2006, but the work on the wiki started about the same time, staying mostly empty for the 3 first months. This makes it easier to evaluate our achievement so far, after approximately two years of operation.
The use of MediaWiki
Michel Bauwens Founder, P2P Foundation michelsub2003@yahoo.com
August 2008 | www.i4donline.net
A wiki is a very simple collaborative technology which allows a community to work together on the production of pages which can be changed by all its members. It’s use is very intuitive, at least for the basic functionalities of creating and organising pages. It was realised at the very start that total openness was counterproductive. Indeed, it was not used intensively for the first three months, the wiki was initially overwhelmed by spam, making it unusable. So, after three-months of passive existence, it was moved to active production, but also to a new principle of admission by cooptation.
This means that every existent member has the right to grant access to on getting request. This introduces a very simple measure of positive social control, as each member will naturally feel responsible for the new members which he has given access. While it makes for much slower growth of the number of contributors, it has also the effect of filtering for motivation. It’s a threshold that is very low, but still demands the effort to communicate one’s desire to participate. In turn, this creates an initial social contact which can be built on. Finally, it has the benefit of creating a social dynamic based on concentric circles of engagement. The principle that we use for content creation is called ‘opportunistic’ updating. This means that we do not necessarily create original content ourselves, but rather use a remix strategy of cutting and pasting significant external contributions in a new combined unity. This is based on the notion that the collective intelligence already exists on the subject, but that it needs a coherent framework so that it can be understood and shared more easily. It is this framework that our wiki provides. We follow the fair use principles and every citation is sourced to the original. The organisation of the wiki is quite simple. We use a three-column organisation on our main page. On the left hand side, we present ourselves, our aims, our associates, and the main material that we have produced ourselves on the topic. The right hand column is a directory of material per format. This means we have separate directories for individuals (a who’s who), for movements (association directory), for podcasts (online audio material), for webcasts (online video), etc.. Finally, in the middle column, we collate material per subject, as in peer to
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