One of the insights from our Sessions event was from Yochai Benkler who said the following about peer production:
we do have very good research on how adding money undermines social motivations depending on contents
I am not sure how to intepret that last part - "depending on contents" - but Yochai's point that "adding money undermines social motivations" is something that ought to be watched carefully.
One place we can watch it carefully is Amazon's recently announced Mechanical Turk service, mturk.com.
Mechanical Turk is about peer producing HITs.
According to Amazon, a HIT is a Human Intelligent Task, ie something that humans do better than computers. Like identifying photos or filling out captchas.
If you need a human to do something, you send a HIT request (via the mturk API) to Amazon.
The HIT is displayed to the masses, who then complete them, and get paid for doing so.
This is an attempt to automate peer production and add a payment system on top of it.
So we'll see if this service "undermined" by the money involved.
In the meantime, I've suggested to a couple of our portfolio companies who have mundane operational taks that they'd love to outsource to check mechanical turk out. Let's see what kind of results they get.
Note: You can find the research Fred references on pages 321-328 of Yochai’s paper Sharing Nicely http://benkler.org/SharingNicely.html where he references the extensive work done by Bruno S. Frey among others.