Dall'impresa gerarchica alla comunità distribuita

Abstract

This article describes the emergence of collaborative production systems, that is those decentralized systems, different from markets and firms, where a community a loosely connected people, with a range of diverse and primarily intrinsic motivation, engage in a large scale collaboration whose outputs are governed as commons (e.g. open software, open hardware, etc.). After a description of the relationship between market system and managerial hierarchy, and the costs connected to each of these systems, the article exposes how peer production is usually organized and identifies the relative advantages of this organizational model over markets and firms under given circumstances. In the last part, the author makes a first attempt to describe the effects of the ongoing organizational innovation on law and governance.