Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Social peer-to-peer processes
Summary
Social peer-to-peer processes are interactions with a peer-to-peer dynamic. These peers can be humans or computers. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the popular concept of the P2P distributed computer application architecture which partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized by systems like Napster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s.
The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. P2P human dynamic affords a critical look at current authoritarian and centralized social structures. Peer-to-peer is also a political and social program for those who believe that in many cases, peer-to-peer modes are a preferable option.
P2P is a specific form of relational dynamic, based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network.
There are several fundamental aspects of social P2P processes:
peer production - the collaborative production of use-value is open to participation and use to the widest possible number (as defined by Yochai Benkler, in his essay Coase's Penguin);
peer governance - production or project is governed by the community of producers themselves, not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy;
peer property - the use-value of property is freely accessible on a universal basis; peer services and products are distributed through new modes of property, which are not exclusive, though recognize individual authorship (i.e. the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons licenses).
Peer production does not produce commodities for exchange value and does not use the price mechanism or corporate hierarchy to determine the allocation of resources.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (4)
HUM-122(a): Global issues: communication A
Le cours présente les enjeux mondiaux actuels liés à la communication instantanée et aux médias sociaux. L'approche interdisciplinaire intègre les SHS et les sciences de l'ingénieur et initie au trava
ENG-632: Entrepreneurial Opportunity Identification and Exploitation
This course focuses on the process of linking technology to market opportunities. Students will gain theoretical and practical knowhow on the process of market opportunity identification and evaluatio
CS-234: Technologies for democratic society
This course will offer students a broad but hands-on introduction to technologies of human self-organization.
Related publications (61)
Related concepts (8)
Open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public.
Economic planning
Economic planning is a resource allocation mechanism based on a computational procedure for solving a constrained maximization problem with an iterative process for obtaining its solution. Planning is a mechanism for the allocation of resources between and within organizations contrasted with the market mechanism. As an allocation mechanism for socialism, economic planning replaces factor markets with a procedure for direct allocations of resources within an interconnected group of socially owned organizations which together comprise the productive apparatus of the economy.
Production for use
Production for use is a phrase referring to the principle of economic organization and production taken as a defining criterion for a socialist economy. It is held in contrast to production for profit. This criterion is used to distinguish communism from capitalism, and is one of the fundamental defining characteristics of communism. This principle is broad and can refer to an array of different configurations that vary based on the underlying theory of economics employed.