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it’s impossible to overstate the importance of peer production to the modern digital world.

What sounds on the face of it like the most utopian of collectivist fantasies — millions of people sharing their ideas with no ownership claims — turns out to have made possible the communications infrastructure of our age.

Peer networks laid the foundation for the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment, via the formal and informal societies and coffeehouse gatherings where new research was shared. The digital revolution has made it clear that peer networks can work wonders in the modern age.

The spirit of these principles is that there should be transparency to the methods, observations, data collection, data access, communication, collaboration and research tools.  Instead of limiting the sharing of the practice of science to publication of selected results, the entire scientific process should be exposed to potential users, collaborators and extenders of the work.

Classrooms will need three (3) pumpkins that range in weight from 1 to 3 pounds. Prior to cutting into the pumpkins, students will first make estimates and then take various measurements of each pumpkin. Students will then count the seeds contained within each pumpkin. All data, other than estimates, will be posted to the TTC web site. As pumpkin data begins to be uploaded to the site, classes can begin analyzing the data.

The lone genius, beavering away in the seclusion of his lab is how most of us imagine the great moments of innovation have come into being. But is this really the whole story?

"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment.

"And so much of that is because it's wonderfully set up for other people to build on top of other people's ideas. In many cases without asking for permission.

by watching his Chatter dashboard, Benioff says he can spot - and reward - pivotal individuals who might not have come to his attention in the past

If these tools take off, then perhaps 'pivotal individuals' within companies really will get noticed, and businesses will become better meritocracies as a result.

Of 3,500 employees in a range of companies and economies, 58% said they would contribute more ideas to their company if they were more likely to be rewarded for them.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.

I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.