Production in which many people contribute freely to a shared resource and coordinate through the resource itself, with no firm or market price directing their work. Yochai Benkler named it commons-based peer production in 2002.
Extended definition
Yochai Benkler introduced the term in “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm” (2002) and developed it in The Wealth of Networks (2006). His examples were free and open-source software and Wikipedia: large projects built by volunteers who choose their own tasks, with the shared work itself showing what needs doing next.
Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation extended the idea to physical production and to the governance and property forms a peer-produced commons needs. The wiki’s cosmo-local production comes from that line of work.
Contrast with adjacent terms
- P4P (peer for peer) names a later step: from horizontal digital exchange between peers to place-based coordination between communities for mutual benefit.
- Stigmergy names the coordination mechanism, in which traces left in a shared medium guide the next contribution. Peer production names the mode of production that often runs on it.
Related terms
Sources
- Benkler, Y. (2002). Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. Yale Law Journal, 112(3), 369-446.
- Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Kostakis et al., Design Global, Manufacture Local
- Ramos et al., The Cosmo-Local Reader
Provenance
Stub entry created 27 September 2026 in the Quartz Sanitation run, to give a page to links from the Michel Bauwens page that pointed at no page. Written from Benkler’s published work and the wiki’s own pages on Bauwens and cosmo-local production. First-pass entry: sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents.