Dan Bricklin examines ways to induce a pool of users to contribute to a commons without extra effort, using the architecture of the commons (as in Napster's default to sharing in the way download directories are available) and leveraging user's self-interest. The key to understanding the success of Napster and other file-sharing technologies resides not in their 'peer-to-peer' nature but in the fact that they provide users with access to a database of desirable things and enable people to create a public good in the process of seeking their own interests.

Bricklin identifies three ways to fill a database: organized manual, organized mechanical, and volunteer manual.

CDDB succeeded at motivating volunteer manual data entry because it leveraged the desire for users to have their data in the database so that CDDB-aware programs could access it, for example when a user would insert a CD into their computer.

Bricklin calls this "harnessing the power of individual selfishness."

Napster cleverly avoided manual data entry by automatically indexing anything in the user's 'Shared Music' directory. Thus "storing the copy in the shared music directory [was] a natural by-product of the user's work with the songs."

Sharing is the default. This results in users "adding to the value of the database without doing any extra work."

Eric Raymond compares two styles of software development using his own experience as illustration. The Cathedral refers to a top-down command-and-control approach, whereas the Bazaar refers to a decentralized cooperative approach. The success of the bazaar-made operating system Linux led Raymond to investigate why that approach succeeded when the accepted norm was that only a Cathedral approach could successfully create good software.

Raymond reaches a number of conclusions about the Bazaar approach to writing software.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. “Scratching an itch” is a way of harnessing self-interest to get high-quality volunteer labor. Developers will work hardest at solving their own problems first, and since those problems are often also other people’s problems, the community has shared incentives to cooperate.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse). This refers to the value of “constructive laziness,” i.e. that good programmers seek to do as little work as possible and therefore are drawn towards the most efficient methods they can find.

"Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11) Raymond clarifies, “you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.”

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you. Your reputation directs things to you as people learn what you are good at.

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor. If you don’t make arrangements for the capable continuation of a software project, then the entire community loses.

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. Your users are your testers.

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus' Law". I am indebted to Jeff Dutky for pointing out that Linus' Law can be rephrased as "Debugging is parallelizable."

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. Brooks, Chapter 9: "Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won't usually need your [code]; it'll be obvious."

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong. The moral? Don't hesitate to throw away superannuated features when you can do it without loss of effectiveness. Antoine de Saint-Exupery (who was an aviator and aircraft designer when he wasn't being the author of classic children's books) said: "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." When your code is getting both better and simpler, that is when you know it's right.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks writes: “while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people.“

Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

"This chapter examines the problem of financing public goods in three settings. Two efforts combine a degree of state coercion in mandating funding, with a decentralized and competitive private sector model for allocating funds. The first is the problem of compensating artists in a world where the most efficient distribution systems are peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. The second concerns the problems of funding the development of new drugs and other medical inventions. Finally, a proposal for new intermediators to facilitate voluntary collective action to finance public goods is considered."

Making DNA sequences centrally and freely available resulted in valuable innovations, such as the software tool BLAST that performs 500 trillion sequence comparisons annually.

"In a series of workshops at New York and Banff, Canada, a group of artists, lawyers, and economists looked at practical issues of how a compulsory license might work, and like most such inquires, discussed how one might set or collect fees, with alternatives such as levies on purchases of computer equipment or bandwidth, or various systems for subscription services, based either upon a flat rate or the amount of downloaded music. Some thought the fees should be paid directly from general tax revenue. There was no group consensus about these issues, but there was an appreciation that it would be good to structure the fee so that it was in some sense free on the margin (similar to how one now pays for cable television or subscriber-based radio services), and that it would be a positive feature if listeners could freely experiment with unknown artists or music types, thus contributing to discovery, growth, and opportunities for new artists."

How to allocate funds was not settled. Would some money be available to finance public goods that are not supported by the marketplace, such as experimental music or recording/archiving folk music? Should artists and studio musicians have a say? The workshops proposed that for part of artist compensation, intermediators would compete against each other and listeners could decide where to put their money. It was suggested that several experiments should be conducted and evaluated: "The Blur/Banff discussions were seeking to find a way that the listeners and artists could build a new social contract that would compete with and possibly replace t he current system of distributing and marketing music. It would seek to liberate the art from the consequences of marketing the art as a commodity. If the P2P model was successful, the expenditures on marketing would fall, and the greater share of resources would be available to artists themselves."

Health care R&D, especially research into new drugs, poses another problem. Although government grants to scientific research through academic institutions supports fundamental research, drug development is carried out by pharmaceutical companies, whose patents enable them to repay the considerable development costs — but the prices bear no relation to the cost of manufacture. The social dilemma balances the self-interest of the pharmaceutical companies who seek rents to justify lengthy and expensive development, and the needs of nations faced by epidemics such as AIDS whose citizens cannot afford access to commercially available drugs. WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires all but least-developed economies to issue patens on medicines. "This suggests a potential modification to the TRIPS agreement to allow countries an alternative way to contribute to global health-care R&D by ensuring that a fixed fraction of their GDP is being spent on supporting health care R&D," releasing such countries from their obligation to allow patents that block generic drug manufacture. Systems for efficiently collecting funds, and how to use them to fund innovation without marketing monopolies are outstanding problems to be solved.

Authors suggest competitive intermediators to "control the allocation of resources to companies and academics carrying out R&D, but not carry it out temselves (as this would be a conflict of interest). Instead each intermediator would concentrate on embracing the business model for resource allocation that it believed was the most efficient for drug development.." Prizes for R&D outputs, small grants, peer-reviewed open research projects are suggested. "Intermediates could also adopt "open" research agendas, since the ability to raise money would not be linked directly to product sales. If employers or individuals believed open research was more productive than proprietary R&D, more money would flow to open R&D projects." Consumers could possibly enjoy savings from reduction in marketing spending, which is a far larger component than R&D in pharmaceutical sales.

Another model, developed in a 2002 Rockefeller dialogue on collective management of intellectual property goods, focuses on lowering transaction costs for voluntary financing for a wide range of public goods by creating a kind of eBay marketplace, matching seekers with philanthropies, individuals, and corporate entitites. "The Matching Funds proposal is to create a new institutional framework that would make it easier to match willing funders and willing suppliers of public goods. The institutional framework would be an intermediator called Matching Funds (MF). The role of MF would be to provide due diligence on proposals for new public goods, and if the review was positive, to list the projects for subscribers." The public could critique the proposal and suggest modifications. "Subscriptions would be binding commitments to fund the project if sufficient support for the project was forthcoming from the community of persons who wanted the project done."

The traditional framework of the organization of economic production includes two modes of production: individuals order their productive activities either under the direction of managers at firms, or as individuals in markets following price signals. Free Software is one example of a broader social-economic phenomenon that Benkler calls 'commons-based peer production', a new, third mode of production in digitally networked environments. In order to explain the emergence of this third mode of production Benkler augments the traditional production framework. Because of the highly variable nature of human expertise, and given a pervasively networked information economy, commons-based peer production has advantages over the two traditional forms of organization. The paper concludes with a discussion of the problems of motivation, loss of motivation, and integration in peer production enterprises. Benkler concludes that (1) "Given a sufficiently large number of contributions, direct monetary incentives necessary to bring about contributions are trivial." and (2) "Peer production is limited not by the total cost or complexity of a project, but by its modularity, granularity, and the cost of integration."

The paper concludes with a discussion of the problems of collective action and how they are solved in the absence of property and the presence of high transaction costs of monetary compensation. Relevant factors include the fact that the resource being produced (information) is non-rival, that problems are divisible into a fine level of granularity, the ability to provide integration (quality control and handling of contributions) in a socially acceptable manner, that the pervasively networked information economy provides access to a large number of potential contributors, and the willingness of contributors to accept non-monetary rewards.

Benkler posits that understanding peer production in the same framework as the mainstream economic theory of organizations could explain the emergence of commons-based peer production. The mainstream economic theory of organizations says that individuals organize into firms whenever the cost of achieving an outcome is greater using a price system. Peer production emerge whenever the cost of peer-based production is lower than either market-based or firm-based production. Property rights emerge whenever the value of a resource is such that its utilization through a property-based appropriation offsets the cost of implementing and enforcing the property rights regime. Commons emerge when the cost of implementing a property regime is higher than the opportunity cost of the property. Market and firm based production can be divided into property based production and commons-based production. Peer-based production fits well into the framework with plenty of examples of both property based production (e.g., Xerox's Eureka) and commons-based peer production (e.g., free software, academic science, Wikipedia).

The emergence of peer production is tied to a pervasively networked information economy. Commons-based peer production has systematic advantages over market and firm based production when (1) the object of production is information or culture, and (2) the physical capital necessary for production is widely distributed. Both of the advantages of peer production are a function of the variability of human capital. First, commons-based peer production has an advantage of having a lowest cost of determining who is the best person for a given task (Benkler calls this 'information opportunity cost'). Second, it has an advantage of allocation efficiency where large groups of potential contributors interact with large groups of resources in the search for new tasks. That is, the practice of firms -- and to a lesser extent markets -- of securing access to limited sets of contributors and resources through contracts and property entails a systematic loss of productivity.

Benkler addresses the problems of motivation, loss of motivation, and integration in peer production enterprises. Benkler concludes the following:

• "Given a sufficiently large number of contributions, direct monetary incentives necessary to bring about contributions are trivial."
• "Peer production is limited not by the total cost or complexity of a project, but by its modularity, granularity, and the cost of integration."

Two kinds of actions represent threats to motivation (1) (the most important) unilateral appropriation by an individual or group of the project and (2) some behavior affecting the intrinsic value of participation for contributors (e.g., failure to integrate a contribution). Free-riding is a common demotivating action in commons. Since information is non-rival, free-riding is a non-issue so long as the pool of contributors is sufficiently large and the act of free-riding does not undermine production. In this sense, 'Absence of exclusion' is the organizing feature of commons-based peer production. Finally, integration requires (1) a quality control or integrity assurance mechanism, and (2) a method for combining individual contributions into the whole.