P2PValue Project

[Chris Pinchen]

 

We are delighted to announce the kickoff of the P2PValue Project in which the P2P Foundation will be collaborating for the next three years.

Here is the project outline:

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 will foster 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 will be empirically and experimentally grounded. Through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods, we will elaborate guidelines for the institutional and technical features that favour value creation in CBPP.
 
The project focuses 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 will be tested using the FP7 FIRE CONFINE facilities, which follow a federated approach in alignment with P2Pvalue’s. This will allow 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 will be supported by experimentation on 3-4 communities that will adopt the platform. Additionally a "Stakeholder Board", composed of external experts and user representatives, will provide periodical evaluation reports to the project.
 
The project takes multi-disciplinary approach: open source software development (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), social network analysis & simulation (University of Surrey, Universidad Complutense de Madrid), sociology (University of Surrey, Università degli Studi di Milano), political science & online governance (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), law & interface design (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), economic innovation (Università degli Studi di Milano, P2PF, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), CBPP practices (P2PF, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

 
We will be working alongside many familiar faces among the project participants and stakeholder board and will be updating here, on the project site and through social networks using the hashtag #P2PValue.