Peer production (also known as mass collaboration[citation needed]) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals.
[4]: 55 For-profit enterprises mostly use partial implementations of peer production, and would include such sites as Delicious, Digg, Etsy, Goodreads, Flickr, Tripadvisor or Yelp.
[4]: 43 Peer production occurs in a socio-technical system which allows thousands of individuals to effectively cooperate to create a non-exclusive given outcome.
[7] From the organizational perspective, peer production is characterized by its minimal formal hierarchies, governance and leadership; in fact some even have a strong anti-hierarchical and leaderless ethos.
[8] For example, there are now several types of open-source solar-powered 3-D printers,[9] which can be used for production in off grid locations[10] and other forms of open source appropriate technology like the use of biomaterials.
As bureaucracy promotes a rationally organized, rule-oriented functioning of society, Kreiss, Finn, and Turner claim that peer production undermines this aspect due to its tendency to encourage individual behavior based on private morality.
This form of peer production, he cautions, leaves room for people to plagiarize ideas and distort original thoughts, which he says ultimately creates an uncertainty in the validity of information.
He warns that websites like Wikipedia promote the notion of the “collective” as all knowing, and that this concentrated influence stands in direct contrast to representative democracy.