contributed articles

Doi: 10.1145/1538788.1538808

It takes a city of developers to build
a big system that is never done.
BY RiCK KAzMAn AnD honG-Mei Chen
The
Metropolis
Model
A new Logic for
Development of
Crowdsourced
systems
two trends in
business and society are reshaping

the world: the rise of the socio-technical network and an emerging service orientation. Benkler⁴ offered a provocative argument about the networked information economy: that we are in the midst of a radical transformation in how we create our information environment. This change is at the heart of the open-source software movement, but oSS is only one example of how society is restructuring around new models of production and consumption of services. The aspect of the restructuring that is most startling “is the rise of effective, large-scale

cooperative efforts—peer production of information, knowledge, and cul-ture…We are beginning to see the expansion of this model not only to our core software platforms, but beyond them into every domain of information and cultural production” ⁴ Benkler calls this phenomenon “ commons-based peer production,” attributing its rise to the rise of “the network.” The networked information environment has dramatically transformed the marketplace, creating new modes and opportunities for how we produce and consume information. Crowdsourcing—the popular term for commons-based peer production—is used to create value in information technology, the arts, basic research, and retail business. ¹³

A “commons” is the opposite of property, referring rather to a set of shared, accessible community resources. Peer production harnesses the creative energies of many self-selecting participants with little or no financial compensation or formal managerial structure. The importance of this form of production is undeniable; as of May 2009 five of the 10 most popular Web sites— MySpace.com, YouTube.com, Facebook.com, Wikipedia.org, and Blogger.com—were produced this way, according to Alexa.com¹; with the exception of Wikipedia, all are for-profit enterprises.

The second trend, coinciding with and compounding the first, is that organizations are moving toward a service orientation as part of the growing worldwide service economy. Service industries in 2007 accounted for 55% of economic activity in the U.S. (http:// www.census.gov/econ/www/servmenu. html). Meanwhile, businesses are shifting from a “goods-dominant” view, in which tangible output and discrete transactions are central, to a service-dominant view, in which intangibility, exchange processes, and relationships are central. ²⁷ In the old goods-dominant logic, “services” (usually plural) were viewed as either a type of (intangible) good or an add-on that enhanced the