Research On The Organizational Model Of Peer Production

Peer production is a new type of organization pattern which is different from the enterprise, market, and general network organization in the field of knowledge product innovation under the environment of Internet information technology, namely many participants scattered all over the world using the Internet to create and share knowledge. They haven’t met each other, generally without any economic compensation, and participants are not restricted to join or quit at any time only through the Internet communication. The concept of peer production,"everyone involved and mutual cooperation", is becoming a commercial boom, and many companies apply it for enterprise technology research and innovation of the operation and management. Many world famous companies have set up special website to invite consumers and other external personnel for innovative ideas and product design for the company. Traced back the development of peer production, it originated from open source software in the1950s, and developed to today’s Linux operating system competing with Windows system. Wikipedia as knowledge output is another example of peer production, which allows the participants not only to browse the web, but also free to edit web pages. Likewise, there have been some special publishing companies which paid the public to complete the task entrusted by the web site, such as InnoCentive, TaskChina, Zhubajie.com.The peer production, which is dependent on the Internet, and with the principles of openness, sharing, and collaboration, is changing the organizational model, innovation model and business model. Why such a loose organization can efficiently produce high quality operating system? In the loss of property rights, without the management level and market pricing, how to efficiently produce complex public goods? Are all public knowledge products suitable for this kind of production organization pattern? Obviously, the traditional enterprise organization theory cannot explain this phenomenon. Therefore, this paper uses case study research method to choose two typical cases for analysis, Zhubajie.com and open source community respectively from tournament-based mode and the collaboration mode. As an exploratory research, this article adopts the NVivo instrument of Australian company QSR as the qualitative analysis tools for data integration and coding; accordingly, this article selects four index, participation motivation, organization structure, operation mechanism, and knowledge output, to conduct a cross case comparison research, thereby making the theoretical resolution for organization pattern of peer production, and finding the innovation of peer production for the traditional organization pattern.The research conclusion of this article is as follows:(1) Peer production is a kind of new organization in the field of knowledge production mode, which can produce high quality products without management level and the lack of property rights. It is inseparable with the conscious behavior of the participants, open resource sharing and the self-organization structure.(2) The peer production organization, to a great extent, relies on the members’ conscious behaviors, and driving force of conscious behaviors depends on the higher level needs of actor inner. Intrinsic motivation is regarded as the fundamental motivation of the participants involved in the peer production project. Although the intrinsic motivation is considered to be derived from the satisfaction of inner psychological needs, it also will bring certain economic benefits for the future in establishing a reputation at the same time.(3) Peer production project which reflects the "self-organization" characteristics, because of no specific profit goal as the same as traditional enterprise, spontaneously formed in the absence of external force and no clear organizational boundaries, meaning that organizations have a certain degree of openness; however, Raymond describes the peer production noisy as like a "bazaar", and such kind of organization which has always been disorderly state is not in conformity with the self organization in an orderly state, so the peer production organizational mode is still different from self-organizing mode.(4) Task modular and member interaction be seen as a key to the success of mass production run. Modular degree is higher, the participants can stimulate public participation, especially modules in collaborative peer production program can be run independently, so modular degree is higher than tournament peer production. Second, the interaction between production projects members is one of security factors for high quality; additionally, frequent interaction improves communication between participants, and low obstructive communication is the key to ensure peer production project success operation conditions.(5) The value of the peer production organization follows the principle of the knowledge sharing, not only within the organization, as well as on the outside of the organization still. In the peer production project, individual and group, individual and individual, the dynamic exchange process between explicit and tacit knowledge implements knowledge sharing as to achieve the knowledge innovation.