Michel Bauwens is a Peer-to-Peer theorist and an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation.
I already talked about Michel Bauwens’s work when discussing the revolution brought by open source and peer production models.
Here is another great video where Michel explains what are peer-production, peer governance and how people use commons to create more value (the Wikipedia and Linux model). This work and organisation processes are fundamentally different compared to the traditional top-down models and Michel explains the characteristics of this new distributed models.
In this seminar, we will look into more detail into the characteristics of the emerging commons-based peer production , how the productive forces of society are horizontalisation through a process of ‘distribution.
The division of labor is moving to a system of distribution of tasks, which has many different characteristics, often the ‘opposite’ of the classic industrial models, but also to the increasing usage of distributed finance, distributed machinery, and other modalities that point out to an alternative mode of value creation.
We will also look at the institutional framework, modes of governance, and the open business models that are used by these new players.
You can read the report Michel is talking about in the video: A Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy. By Michel Bauwens, Nicolas Mendoza and Franco Iacomella, et al. Orange Labs and P2P Foundation, 2012, here: