People Power

posted on 30th June 2006 by Laurence

Chris Anderson of Wired discusses the Age of Peer Production http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/people.html.

"From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content…

The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale…

These companies have found ways to harness the wisdom of the crowd, extracting information that was there all along, just latent and lost."

Chris refers specifically to consumers but the Peer Production model is just as relevent in a commercial environment. Companies, particularly those with larger workforces should be using these tools of production internally to encourage workers to share knowledge and useful information. By creating a network of peer-produced content companies can harness the collective knowledge and talent of staff that could otherwise leave and take it with them.