The Washington Post reported Sunday from Pearlington, Mississippi that "charity efforts have constituted more than 80% of the home rebuilding completed so far." The largest home builder has been Habitat for Humanity. In addition to highlighting the embarrassing government response to Katrina, this makes a huge statement for the power of volunteerism, or to use "new media" terms "social production" or "peer production".
But peer production isn't just for social good anymore. The Post also reports on how Doritos will be running "make-your-own" Super Bowl ads saving millions from production costs and leveraging content from over 1,000 ad-makers gunning for the $10,000 price.
Or check out the Netflix Prize where teams are competing for $1M if they "substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to a love a movie". (Thanks to Ken for this tip.) According to their Leaderboard, over 19,000 contestents from 130 countries are competing and the best are 2/3's of the way to the Netflix goal.
What's so motivating about peer production? In simple terms, the huge labor pool available to be tapped. We know there are about 1 billion internet users. If each of them has 1 hour of discretionary time per day to spend on a problem that amounts to half-a-million work years of labor per day! Put another way, that time amounts to 47 times the daily labor from the entire Federal government civilian work force of 2.6 million people.
What could you do with that many staff?
Here are the references:
