P2P Value Project

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a new and increasingly significant model of social innovation based on collaborative production by citizens through the Internet. This project aimed at fostering the CBPP phenomenon by providing a techno-social software platform specifically designed to facilitate the creation of resilient and sustainable CBPP communities. The design of the P2Pvalue platform has been empirically and experimentally grounded. Through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods, the team elaborated guidelines for the institutional and technical features that favour value creation in CBPP.

The project focused on three key areas of improvement over current platforms:

Enhancing community sustainability by adopting the governance, legal, economic, and technical infrastructures that favour value creation and resilience;
Supporting the contributors with systems of reward that allow value to flow back to the creators;
Integrating the functionalities of online social networking services and collaborative software in a privacy-aware platform based on a decentralised architecture.

The platform was tested using the FP7 FIRE CONFINE facilities, which follow a federated approach in alignment with P2Pvalue’s. This allowed us to deploy, run, monitor and experiment with an open ecosystem of distributed P2Pvalue nodes within the CONFINE community networks. Evaluation of the P2Pvalue platform was supported by experimentation on 3-4 communities that adopted the platform. Additionally a “Stakeholder Board”, composed of external experts and user representatives, provided periodical evaluation reports to the project.

The project took multi-disciplinary approach: open source software development (UCM), social network analysis & simulation (UniS, UCM), sociology (UniS, UMIL), political science & online governance (UAB), law & interface design (CNRS), economic innovation (UMIL, P2PF, UAB), CBPP practices (P2PF, UAB).