SETI@home ("SETI at home") is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project

The two original goals of SETI@home were: to do useful scientific work by supporting an observational analysis to detect intelligent life outside Earth, and to prove the viability and practicality of the 'volunteer computing' concept.

With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, the project is the distributed computing project with the most participants to date. The original intent of SETI@home was to utilize 50,000-100,000 home computers.[11] Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time[when?]. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations. It is acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history.[18] With over 278,832 active computers in the system (2.4 million total) in 234 countries, as of November 14, 2009, SETI@home has the ability to compute over 769 teraFLOPS.[19] For comparison, the K computer, which as of June 20, 2011 was the world's fastest supercomputer, achieved 8.162 petaFLOPS.

For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one "owns" the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals.

much broader social-economic phenomenon. 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.

this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than do either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are substantial increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and resources that are part of the system. The article concludes with an overview of how these models use a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems by property and contract.

 value networks, a new way to produce and to distribute value. This section focuses on the second one. We are taking an iterative approach to solve the value accounting problem and to design and implement a sound value system, which allows individuals and small organizations to collaboratively create and distribute value. The main role of the value accounting system is to track different types of contributions, like personal, social, built and natural capital, and to compute a revenue share for all contributors, based on individual contribution. But in order to make value networks self-organize into creative and productive entities we need more than a sound value system. We are in fact developing the entire infrastructure of value networks, which includes communication, coordination and collaboration tools, a reputation system, a role system, an incentive system, a feedback system, a service system, a materials management system, a project/tasks management system, etc. All these components interact with each other and form a humane and empowering environment, in which contributing member can express their passions, exchange and collaborate to create value. We are not just dreaming about this. SENSORICA, which is sustaining a continuous growth in value and in potential since its inception, is a living proof of our model. 

Crowdsourcing came from the realization that companies (i.e. closed and hierarchical (feudal) organizations) can use the new technology to coordinate input from a very large number of entities, including a mass of individuals. The relation remains asymmetrical between the outsourceR, a closed, intrinsically individualistic organization and the outsourceE. The only thing that changes is the nature of the outsourceE. Instead of being one entity (individual or organization) executing a particular set of tasks, it is now an informal group of individuals, the crowd. In the eyes of the outsourceR the role of the outsourceE is the same. Although the different nature of the outsourceE forces the outsourceR to slightly modify its practices. There are two important patterns of crowdsourcing A company creating and maintaining it's own crowd for harvesting - the case of FIAT and its Mio project.  A web-based company offering a matchmaking service between companies' needs and the crowd - http://www.ideaken.com/   

over the crowd

which has some advantage

The enterprise collaboration space has entered an exciting new phase of collaboration. New software and applications are coming to market, as are new concepts for how to work and communicate in the knowledge age. From consumer-grade apps like those from Box.net and Huddle to software from long-established players like Microsoft and Oracle, these tools are taking collaboration technology past the traditional IT decision-making process and changing the way we approach the workday. Additional companies in this report include Skype, Huddle, Jive, Moxie and Yammer.

But the benefits of working less, it turns out, aren't just for the individual enjoying a happier life. A culture less focused on the rat race means serious benefits for the planet and the economy, as well.