The emergence of distributed networks, defined by capacity of agents to freely determine their
actions and relations, and of the internet and the social web in particular, have created a new set
of technological affordances creating a broad range of open knowledge and open design
communities functioning according to a ‘peer to peer’ social logic. These communities have set
in motion a new set of social processes for the creation of value, which we could summarize as
peer production (the ability to produce in common), peer governance (the capacity to self-
organize) and peer property (the capacity to make common production universally available).
The social web has created the possibility to create complex social services, and ‘productive
systems’, through the global coordination and scaling of small group processes of mass
participation, moving them from the periphery of social life to its very center.
The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of this new social process, and to see howthey are specifically related to the issue of human happiness.
The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of this new social process, and to see howthey are specifically related to the issue of human happiness.
