Peer2Politics

The Internet is allowing virtual communities to easily co-create digital assets and intellectual content at a very low “cooperation cost”. The ideology behind the open-source software development methodology has actually spread to new domains such as open-data, open-design and open-innovation. A new set of Internet tools and services is now available to leverage the “wealth and the wisdom of the crowd”. Complex projects can be crowd-sourced and crowd-funded by small and medium sized companies to reduce their cost of doing business. The “crowd” itself uses and modifies “open-data” to “co-create” new open-designs for the purpose of participating to “crowd-sourced” projects.

Through the case of the RepRap-based, Lego-built three-dimensional (3D) printing-milling machine, this paper sets out to discuss and illustrate two points: First, on a theoretical level, that modularity, not only in terms of development process but also of hardware components, can catalyze Commons-based peer production’s (CBPP) replication for tangible products enabling social experimentation and learning. Second, the hybrid 3D printing-milling machine demonstrates the digitization of material and the potential of digital fabrication. We show how the synergy of a globally accessible knowledge Commons as well as of the CBPP practices with digital fabrication technologies, which are advancing and becoming more and more accessible, can arguably offer the ability to think globally and produce locally.