Professor Yochai Benkler has described collaborative projects and open-source economics as a form of “commons-based peer production”. Peer production, in his terms, is an opportunity to practice virtuous behavior. The internet has enabled virtuous behavior to affect large scale projects, in turn spreading the virtues of the system and producing output that could not be done in smaller scale or more centralized projects.

The most important principles for peer production are modularity, granularity, and low cost of integration. Modules are individual pieces of a project that can be done asynchronously across multiple places and disciplines, and merge the efforts of several individuals of the commons. Granularity refers to how well those modules can be broken down, allowing people of different levels of integration, motivation and skill to contribute. Low-cost integration refers to the ease with which a module can be added to the project as a whole, making the need for hierarchical oversight as low as possible.

The most obvious examples of these projects are open-source software projects, many of which can have tens or hundreds of thousands of collaborators. Linux and Unix, the base for most operating systems in use today come from this type of collaboration. The basis of the internet itself and many major improvements are based on peer production as well, such as the most popular web server, Apache. I’m of course a huge proponent of WordPress, one of the most public and successful of these projects, powering close to a quarter of the most popular websites on the internet.

Code projects aren’t the only things affected by this virtuous behavior. Knowledgebases such as Wikipedia and Quora couldn’t exist or function without people who devote their own time freely to the increase of public knowledge. While they are for-profit corporations, Slashdot and Reddit are also community based projects, sharing news based on the interests of their users. Any social network follows from this network effect as well: The larger the network (virtuous cycle) gets, the more useful it becomes.