Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage [1] has been chosen as book of the week on the P2P Foundation Website, and over the next few days a number of selected excerpts will be published on Michel Bauwens's P2P Foundation blog. The first two of these have now gone up - check them out, and feel free to leave a comment on the blog or discuss them over at the P2P Foundation Ning site [2].
The first excerpt provides a general outline of and motivation for the produsage concept [3] - it outlines the decline of the conventional production chain as we were familiar with it during the industrial age, and the corresponding rise of produsage as a hybrid model of content creation which involves users as producers: in other words, produsers. Necessarily, this also fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the outcomes of such processes: produsage generates only temporary artefacts which themselves remain up for further development, not fixed and finished products - even though many such artefacts (from open source software to the Wikipedia, and beyond) can be used to substitute for the products of industrial processes.
The second instalment [4] addresses an important consequence of this shift from a closed production model (where only a select group of participants are able to produce content) to an open produsage approach: it highlights the question of how this changes relations between professionals and amateurs, experts and folks. At present, that's a question which exercises debate especially in areas such as citizen journalism and knowledge management - witness the different approaches of Wikipedia and Citizendium, for example -, but its implications reach well beyond these flashpoints into virtually all domains where produsage models are now being established.
I'll post up these excerpts here on the site soon, too - but for now, head over to the P2P Foundation blog [5] to read more. There will be another excerpt or two in the coming days!
Update: I've now also posted all four excerpts on this site. [6]