Yochai Benkler em São Paulo, novembro de 2004

Esta é a "home page" da visita de Yochai Benkler a São Paulo, em novembro de 2004. A página, localizada em http://www.ime.usp.br/~is/Benkler, conterá sempre as informações mais atualizadas sobre a visita.

Todas as atividades estão abertas para o público.

A participação no Workshop Tidia exige uma inscrição prévia. Ela pode ser feita aqui.

Yochai Benkler é Professor da Faculdade de Direito da Universidade Yale. Ele é o autor de alguns dos trabalhos mais originais e inovativos sobre a natureza e o potencial das novas práticas de cooperação e de compartilhamento através da Internet. Nestes trabalhos ele postulou uma nova forma de produção de riquezas que denominou de "commons-based peer-production". O Software Livre e a Wikipedia são exemplos notáveis produzidos com este novo método produtivo.

Ele estará em São Paulo entre os dias 4 e 9 de novembro, participando das seguintes atividades:

Seguem os resumos das palestras e as principais referências, todas disponíveis na Internet.

Palestra no Workshop Tidia

The emergence of peer production and sharing in the networked information economy.

Veja as transparências desta palestra.

Abstract

Social sharing and exchange is becoming a common modality of producing valuable desiderata at the very core of the most advanced economies in information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors. Free software, distributed computing, ad hoc mesh wireless networks, and other forms of peer production offer clear examples of such large-scale, measurably effective sharing practices.

I suggest that the highly distributed capital structure of contemporary communications and computation systems is largely responsible for the increased salience of social sharing as a modality of economic production in that environment. By lowering the capital costs required for effective individual action, these technologies have allowed various provisioning problems to be structured in forms amenable to decentralized production based on social relations, rather than through markets or hierarchies.

Once social production becomes technically feasible, it offers an alternative production modality, whose relative attractiveness, by comparison to markets, firms, and government provisioning can be analyzed in terms of comparative transaction costs and comparative information characteristics of each process. However, the broad term of peer production, or social production, covers different forms of motivation and organization. There are instrumental and non-instrumental motivations. There are more or less loosely organized platforms for cooperation.

Understanding how the motivational and organizational forms of this modality operate is important whether one seeks to engage in institutional design that takes into consideration the presence of social production as a potential source of welfare, or whether one is concerned with building a business model that harnesses the power of social production be it for-profit, like IBMs relationship with the GNU/Linux development community, or nonprofit, like NASAs relationship with the contributors to SETI@home.

We need is to recognize that a broad set of social practices can be sustainable and efficient substitutes for markets, firms, and bureaucracies, and we need to begin to study how to make these new practices as effective as they can be.

Discussão no Workshop Tidia

Cooperação e Compartilhamento na Economia da Informação em Rede.

O tema acima será discutido com Yochai Benkler, com a participação de cientistas brasileiros de várias áreas do conhecimento.

Participam, como debatedores, José Fernando Perez, Fernando Reinach, Daniela Zaitz, Ethevaldo Siqueira, Gilson Schwartz, Daniel Schwabe, Arnaldo Mandel e Imre Simon. O debate será moderado por Mônica Teixeira.

Palestra no Instituto de Estudos Avançados da USP

Freedom and justice in the commons: A political economy of information

A sessão será presidida pelo Vice-reitor da USP, Professor Hélio Nogueira da Cruz. Os debatedores serão: Tom Dwyer (IFCH-UNICAMP) e Gilberto Tadeu Lima (FEA-USP). O palestrante será apresentado por Imre Simon (IME-USP).

Veja o anúncio, o cartaz e as transparências desta palestra.

Abstract

We are in the midst of a technological and economic transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of individual freedom, of cultural discourse, of political participation, and of social justice in the information society. The Internet is making possible the emergence to much greater significance of non-proprietary, non-market forms of production of information, knowledge and culture. In particular, it is permitting individuals, acting alone and in loose affiliation with others, to become producers of their own information and cultural environment.

This is a dramatic departure from a one-hundred and fifty year long trend towards commercialization and concentration of our information and cultural production system. This transition moment in the material conditions of information and cultural production offers us an opportunity to structure that system in ways that will improve individual freedom, provide us with a greater cultural diversity, improve political discourse, and ameliorate some aspects of economic injustice, in particular global developmental inequalities, while allowing us to improve our productivity in the information economy.

But the cornucopia of desired changes threatens a number of the entrenched economic and cultural forces of the industrial information economy of the 20th century. Hollywood, the broadcasters, and the recording industry are threatened by the potential emergence of non-proprietary, non-market information and cultural production. Proprietary software vendors are threatened by the emergence of free software. And telephone, cable, and mobile phone incumbents are threatened by the emergence of non-proprietary alternatives to their systems, like open wireless networks or municipal fiber to the home.

In court cases, regulatory proceedings, and legislation we see today a campaign waged over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. At stake in these battles is the question of whether the digital environment will permit non-proprietary, non-market production among peer users to flourish, bringing with it a series of well-defined improvements in freedom and distributive justice, or whether it will be tailored to suit the needs of business models based on proprietary provisioning of finished consumption goods to passive consumers. As was the case with print, radio, and telephone, the institutional choices we make during this early formative period are likely to determine the answer to this question for decades to come.

The talk will offer an analytic framework and practical outline for thinking through the choices we are making today in terms of their consequences for the society we will build around the emerging networked information environment.

Principais referências

Para a palestra e discussão no Workshop Tidia:

.
  • Yochai Benkler
  • "Sharing Nicely": On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production
  • forthcoming, 114 Yale L. J. __ (2004)
  • http://benkler.org/SharingNicely.html

Para a palestra no IEA:

Outros trabalhos de Yochai Benkler encontram-se na sua "home page" em http://www.benkler.org/.

Maiores informações

Maiores informações com Imre Simon no e-mail is@ime.usp.br ou no telefone 3091-6135.

Todos são bem-vindos!

Mas, não se esqueçam de se registrar no Workshop Tidia, para participar das atividades incluídas naquele Simpósio.

Versão: 10nov04 18:45. Última atualização: 16jul05 16:37