: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation

Dr Axel Bruns Media & Communication Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Precinct, Z2-202 Kelvin Grove, Qld. 4059 Australia +61 7 3138 5548 [email protected]

ABSTRACT User-led content creation today takes place in a wide This paper outlines the concept of produsage as a model of variety of online environments. These range from widely describing today’s emerging user-led content creation distributed, loose and ad hoc networks of participants (such environments. Produsage overcomes some of the systemic as the blogosphere) to more centralized sites of problems associated with translating industrial-age ideas of collaborative work (such as the ); while some content production into an informational-age, social such environments exist as virtually ungoverned spaces software, Web 2.0 environment. Instead, it offers new ways (like Indymedia), some have developed hierarchical or at of understanding the collaborative content creation and least heterarchical structures (as have many open source development practices found in contemporary software development projects), and others both exhibit informational environments. emergent self-organising tendencies as well as operate under some degree of corporate governance (as is the case Keywords for example in multiplayer online games). A number of key Produsage, produser, content, user-led, information age, domains are currently driving the development of user-led Web 2.0, social software, creativity, collaboration online environments. INTRODUCTION Social Networking A significant paradigm shift is now underway. The rise of Past years have seen the rapid rise of a variety of social what is now described as social software or Web 2.0 networking tools; these include sites such as Facebook, environments stands to have a profound impact on social Myspace, LinkedIn, Orkut, and Cyworld, and variously practices, the media, economic and legal frameworks, and address specific cultural and societal groups. Social democratic society itself; however, it is as yet poorly networking environments are further augmented by understood and insufficiently theorized. In particular, functionally more specific tools – these include social studies of user-led online phenomena continue to operate bookmarking systems such as del.icio.us, geo-mapping by applying, sometimes without much critical reflection, tools such as Google Maps and Frappr, and personal analytical frameworks established during the industrial age publishing systems in the form of blogs. which by now are increasingly outdated. In the context of online user-led content creation environments ranging from Knowledge Management open source through to massively multiplayer online Collaborative knowledge management is now emerging as roleplaying games (MMPORGs), the very idea of content a key challenge to the traditional guardian authorities of production may need to be challenged: the description of a knowledge; the Wikipedia has become a major threat to new hybrid form of simultaneous production and usage, or publications such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and produsage, may provide a more workable model. studies suggest that in some areas its content quality may be on par with that of its corporate competitors [6]. Similarly, the user-annotated maps and satellite images of LEAVE BLANK THE LAST 2.5 cm (1”) OF THE LEFT Google Earth challenge the position of traditional map and COLUMN ON THE FIRST PAGE FOR THE atlas publishers, while a wide variety of more specific COPYRIGHT NOTICE. knowledge management projects (often utilizing wiki technology) are playing similar roles in particular discipline domains. Creative Practice Open Source Software Development Sites such as Flickr for images, YouTube, Jumpcut, and Perhaps the earliest mainstream form of online user-led Revver for video, and ccMixter for audio, as well as a content creation, open source arises from the acutely felt plethora of blogs and collaborative publishing need for software with functionality beyond what is offered environments for text, now provide a rich and diverse by currently available proprietary packages. Built on the range of user-submitted creative content. Further, legal principle of the free and open availability of all source frameworks such as the suite of code, open source enables users to participate in flexible licenses allow for the re-use and remixing of existing roles ranging from developer to coordinator to software content into new artworks which are then able to be further tester, and relies on what Eric Raymond has described as reworked by subsequent generations of users. This opens the power of ‘eyeballs’ [11] – that is, the principle that the up new avenues for creative work and publication beyond quality of software is directly related to the number of the traditional media industries, as well as undermining participants able to engage in the development process. romantic notions of the artist as individual genius. TOWARDS A UNIFIED MODEL OF USER-LED CONTENT Multi-User Online Gaming CREATION As computer gaming moves into connected online spaces, Beyond such individual domains, however, and propelled games producers are increasingly reliant on the by their contributions, there is today a wider trend towards participation of gamers as content creators. The computer the establishment of tools and processes for user-led games paradigm has shifted from producing strict narrative content creation. For example, the principles of open structures which are played out by gamers, to providing a source software development can now be seen applied to rich narrative and social environment in which multiple , turning journalistic content into open gamers cooperate in creating their own narrative paths, news (see [2]); Raymond’s ‘power of eyeballs’ argument is building on cues placed in the game by its developers or by also at play in the massively distributed factchecking other users. Additionally, gamers are also increasingly implied in the Wikipedia’s slogan ‘anyone can edit’; and involved in the development of additional content for the the outcomes of collaborative creative practice are games themselves – as Herz reports, for example, some beginning to enter traditional media forms through conduits 90% of content in The Sims is now created by its users such as the Current.tv Website and cable TV channel. rather than the game publisher Maxis [8]. Such examples point to the fact that a wider trend away Citizen Journalism from the practices of the industrial age, and towards new Ranging from individually published news and politics user-led information-age paradigms, can be seen to develop blogs to collaboratively written and edited sites such as here. This paradigm shift is by no means complete at this Indymedia, the technology news site Slashdot, or the point, however, and its implications are still emerging; it is Korean opinion leader OhmyNews, citizen journalism all the more important, then, to begin the process of fundamentally disrupts the industrial journalism model by outlining its fundamental characteristics. employing its users as journalists and commentators (see At the same time, it is also necessary to consider existing [2]). Citizen journalism is discursive and deliberative, and models for describing the increased involvement of users in better resembles a conversation than a lecture, as blogger- content creation. In the 1970s, futurist coined journalist Dan Gillmor has put it [7]. It has already shown the term ‘’ [13] to highlight the emergence of a an impact on political processes in the United States, more informed, more involved consumer of goods who Europe, Korea, and many other countries around the world. would need to be addressed by allowing for a greater Collaborative Filtering customisability and individualisability of products; this Citizen journalism, which often builds on, debates, and indicated the shift from mass industrial production of critiques the published reports of mainstream journalistic goods to a model of on-demand, just-in-time production of organizations, can also be seen as a form of collaborative custom-made items. Advancing beyond this, Charles filtering – sifting through the vast amount of information Leadbeater has introduced the notion of ‘pro-am’ now available in online environments in order to discover cooperation [10] – alluding to a joint effort of producers the most relevant, important, or useful information for and consumers in developing new and improved specific purposes or communities. More or less overtly, this commercial goods. Similarly, the industry observers behind model is also at the heart of major commercial operations Trendwatching.com speak of a trend towards ‘customer- today: Amazon’s recommendations, for example, are based made’ products [14], while J.C. Herz has described the on the evaluation of its large user-base’s search, listing, and same process as ‘harnessing the hive’ [8]: commercial purchase patterns, while Google’s PageRank system is producers’ adoption of promising and useful ideas which predicated on an evaluation of the Web population’s were generated by expert consumers. content filtering patterns as expressed through page However, such models maintain a traditional industrial interlinkages. value production chain: they retain a producer Æ distributor Æ consumer trichotomy. But especially where what is produced is of an intangible, informational nature, a materials into a finished product according to an existing further shift away from such industrial, and towards post- blueprint, recipe, or other model. The assembled product is industrial or informational economic models can be complete and finished and ideally represents the best observed. In such models, the production of ideas takes outcome possible given the producer’s current knowledge place in a collaborative, participatory environment which and skills, and the intended price point. breaks down the boundaries between producers and Further, in a traditional production process the product is consumers and instead enables all participants to be users then shipped from producer to distributor, who will add as well as producers of information and knowledge – packaging and/or other ancillary materials, and might frequently in an inherently and inextricably hybrid role bundle the product with others for distribution and sale. where usage is necessarily also productive: participants are Customers purchase the product and are entitled to certain produsers (also see [3]). consumer rights, but usually remain at a significant These produsers engage not in a traditional form of content distance from the original producer, providing (if at all) production, but are instead involved in produsage – the only general and individual feedback on product quality or collaborative and continuous building and extending of possible improvements, and must purchase an entirely new existing content in pursuit of further improvement. product when the next version or edition of the product is Produsage can be described through four key released by the producer and made available through the characteristics: distributor. • a shift from dedicated individuals and teams as This model of an industrial production value chain has producers to a broader-based, distributed operated throughout the industrial age, and applies to generation of content by a wide community of physical goods (e.g. cars) as much as to informational participants; goods in physical formats (e.g. music CDs), and also still to many informational goods in intangible formats (e.g. • fluid movement of produsers between roles as commercial software available for online purchase). While leaders, participants, and users of content – such well-established in contemporary consciousness, overall it produsers may have backgrounds ranging from could be seen as an aberration rather than the dominant professional to amateur; model for the creation of goods and ideas, however – in the • artefacts generated are no longer products in a absence of a steady stream of mass-produced commodities, traditional sense: they are always unfinished, and pre-industrial production models may have been built more continually under development – such on the continuous maintenance and improvement of usable development is evolutionary, iterative, and goods than on the replacement of existing goods with new palimpsestic; products, for example. • produsage is based on permissive regimes of Similarly, at least in the context of informational goods this engagement which are based on merit more than traditional value chain may no longer provide an accurate ownership: they frequently employ copyright and appropriate model. The most important change in this systems which acknowledge authorship and context concerns the status of the product itself. Traditional prohibit unauthorised commercial use, yet enable production models conceptualize products as existing in continuing collaboration on further content discrete versions, which are released at a time chosen by improvement. the producer. Further, the distribution of products is While their emphases may vary, each of the domains of controlled by producers and distributors, not by consumers user-led content creation outlined above, and many other – consumers, on the other hand, are seen as mainly passive user-led phenomena, can be described using the framework and isolated ‘end users’ who literally consume, or use up, of these characteristics. products until they are depleted and need to be replaced with new and updated versions. As a result of this Beyond Production conceptualization of the product, the core business of While other existing models, from Toffler’s ‘prosumer’ to producers is seen in the production of these goods. Benkler’s ‘commons-based ’ [1], have been usefully applied to describe some of the phenomena of However, it is immediately evident that this model no user-led content creation, it is important to recognize the longer applies in produsage environments. Here, the fundamental problems inherent in the term ‘production’ outcomes of the produsage process are no longer discrete itself, which is perhaps inextricably linked with an product versions, but rather rapidly evolving revisions of industrial paradigm; ‘produsage’, on the other hand, existing content, released for public view and further provides a way to move beyond such hurdles. update immediately upon revision. The Wikipedia, for example, will always display the most recently edited A traditional (and for our present purposes, necessarily revision of its content, and not a specific daily, monthly, or simplified) model of production would see the producer as annual issue (as has been the case with traditional an individual or organization which transforms raw encyclopedias, for operational as much as for practical reasons). Other domains are also frequently seen to corporations are ill-advised to ignore such groups. What is struggle to accommodate a revisions- rather than versions- necessary instead is a direct engagement with users wishing based model of content production – journalism’s industrial to collaborate as co-produsers: an opening of production production practices are better suited to a traditional model processes and a refashioning as produsage. providing for news updates at regularly scheduled times This creates problems for intellectual property tracking, than for a 24-hour production cycle, for example, while the however – and in this context it is again necessary to commercial software industry has yet to effectively rethink the traditional conceptualization of production and reconcile a need to provide rapid revisions as bugs are products. Indeed, where industrial production is built on fixed and new functionality added with a desire to market the commercial exploitation of the products themselves, distinct versions of their products on an annual basis to open source points to a significantly different business maximize profits. model: here, the core business lies not in the sale of If, as we argue here, the very term ‘product’ implies an copyrighted products, but in the provision of services existence in a discreet, apparently finished version, then it around a freely available, collaborative developed (or is very clear that the outcomes of produsage can no longer prodused) artifact. Again, this serves to demonstrate that be described as products; instead, the momentarily current the traditional idea of the product no longer applies in this revision of any one page in the Wikipedia, any one case – and if static products become dynamic artifacts, software package prodused by the open source community, rapidly updated and revised, then commercial models built or any one creative work developed by a distributed group around this instable, ongoing process must be (and in some of co-creators within a creative commons licensing domains, have been) developed. framework, should be seen as nothing more than a What remains to be seen is the extent to which the concepts temporary artifact of an ongoing process of produsage. and processes of produsage are able to impact on areas of Further, any description of such processes in the traditional non-informational production. One core driver for the terms of ‘production’ and ‘products’ which we have universal adoption of production models during the inherited from traditional theory must be rethought and industrial age has been the need to achieve a mass revised to address these insights. distribution of physical products; such models have only In such informational contexts, the traditional models of been altered, but not fundamentally challenged by trends production are further complicated by the fact that users are towards individualization and customization in the late no longer passive consumers, but frequently express a industrial age. At most, these changes have led to the desire to participate actively in guiding the development closing of a feedback loop in the industrial production process for new and existing products. Whether value chain – enabling producers to gather feedback and encouraged by commercial entities or not, they are seen to ideas from their customers, which further influence the join together in enthusiast and interest groups which development of new products that are again produced and effectively lobby developers for desired outcomes; distributed using standard models.

commercial / non-profit harnessing of user- generated content (e.g. The Sims) content development commercial / space set up by non-profit community or services to company support content (e.g. Wikimedia development Foundation; (e.g. Red Hat, Google) SourceForge)

valuable, often commercial- grade content is created

initial IP commercial activities by contributions users themselves from public domain or (e.g. support services, commercial consultancies, content sources sales)

Fig. 1: collaborative, iterative, evolutionary, palimpsestic user-led content development Commercial Approaches where game operator Sony attempted to bar its The produsage model (as outlined in Fig. 1) takes a users from selling their hard-earned game significantly different shape, however: here, artifacts are characters and artifacts on eBay, can be seen as created by users themselves, acting as produsers, within instances of this practice (see for example [12]). produsage environments. This does not imply that Approaches such as harnessing and harvesting the hive traditional producers or products have no role to play here have also been utilized by the developers of traditional- – often, for example, produsage builds in initial inputs style products, in fact: here, companies utilize online produced along traditional lines, but then applies the communities for the collaborative produsage of ideas distributed knowledge and creativity of the produser which can be converted into physical or informational community to further revise this work. Similarly, some products. A variety of examples for such processes are traditional production organizations have refashioned described in Trendwatching.com’s ‘Customer-Made’ themselves to participate in the produsage process: they newsletter [14], including for example Apple’s harvesting have shifted from a focus of their commercial activity on of ideas for new versions of the iPod, or BMW’s gathering production to new models which work with the artifacts of driver feedback for the development of new model lines. emerging from the produsage community and provide Such practices have also been described as ancillary commercial services surrounding them, or which ‘crowdsourcing’ (playing on the corporate term provide services into the community of produsers itself. ‘outsourcing’): the employment – usually in a figurative Such approaches can be broadly divided into these models: rather than monetary sense – of users as produsers of ideas. • Harnessing the hive: adapted from Herz [8], this Given that in most such scenarios, users are rarely model describes the non-commercial or acknowledged or rewarded for their intellectual labor, the commercial utilization of produsage artifacts by morality of the crowdsourcing approach is highly organizations inside and outside the produsage disputable. community, while respecting applicable content Nonetheless, outside of these mainly exploitative licences and cooperating with the community. It approaches to operationalizing the produsage phenomenon describes for example the aggregation services in for commercial gain, sustainable as well as ethical business the blogosphere, which identify and collect the models built on produsage are possible. Mostly, however, most-cited blog posts or tags and make them they will differ significantly from traditional production- easily accessible to all participants. based business models in that they focus on the delivery of • Harvesting the hive: this model describes the services around produsage artifacts, rather than on the provision of value-added services using artefacts development and marketing of products themselves. Such developed by the produsage community, aimed services include consultancy on the effective utilization of mainly at non-participants – for example, the prodused artifacts (such as consultancy provided by expert development of ready-to-install open source open source developers to organizations wishing to switch distribution packages by companies like Red Hat. from proprietary to open source solutions for their systems, Such practices are mostly benign unless applicable for example), aggregation and packaging services for content licenses are ignored by the harvester. prodused artifacts (including Red Hat and other open source packaging services, as well as printing and • Harbouring the hive: this model points to the publishing services for artists in collaborative creative provision of value-added services into the produsage communities), filtering and quality control produsage community – for example community services (producing ‘best of Wikipedia’ or ‘best of Flickr’ hosting as it is offered by SourceForge for open selections in printed or CD-ROM format), and hosting source projects, by Wikia for wiki-based services for produsage communities and projects. knowledge management communities, or by Flickr Additionally, there is also a growing market in providing for photo enthusiasts. Again, such practices are expert input into produsage environments and communities mostly benign unless a community lock-in to the – for example, some players in multi-user online games harbouring service is exploited by the service will pay significant sums for already developed characters provider (and such threats may exist in the context or in-game goods, while some knowledge management or of the increasing reliance of users on Flickr for open source software development communities may be photosharing, for example). prepared to pay for the contribution of recognized experts • Hijacking the hive: combining the worst aspects in their field into the overall project. of harvesting and harbouring, this practice FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF PRODUSAGE deliberately aims to achieve lock-in of produsage At present there is a growing trend towards the communities for financial gain. Recent debates for mainstreaming of what has been described in this paper as example over the heavy-handed enforcement of produsage approaches – demonstrated for example in the end-user license agreements (EULAs) in recent acquisitions of MySpace by Rupert Murdoch’s News massively multi-user online games like EverQuest, Corporation, of Flickr by Yahoo!, or of YouTube by Effectively addressed through educational and other Google, as well as in the increasing academic interest in the programs, and widely practiced by broad sections of the study of social software in a variety of disciplinary community, on the other hand, the commons-based contexts. While frequently guilty of boosterism, approaches of produsage point to the opportunity for Trendwatching.com describes the participants in such citizen participation in fields from artistic practice to phenomena as a new ‘Generation C’, whose creative political debate and deliberation, as well as opening the engagement in content development will lead to a “casual way towards new models for economic activity which are collapse”: “the ongoing demise of many beliefs, rituals, at least as much based on broad community participation as formal requirements and laws modern societies have held they are on the pursuit of corporate profits. dear” [15] – including, we might add, a good part of the Ultimately, indeed, such shifts may come to have a direct traditional content production industries. This is already impact on citizenship processes themselves: it is possible to evident in the crises experienced by industries as diverse as argue that current practices of political participation by software, journalism, music, and broadcast, each of which citizens have been similarly influenced by the dominant have struggled to hold on to existing markets while finding paradigms of the industrial age, and that a shift to it difficult to attract new consumers especially in younger produsage might unsettle them. Where at present many age groups. developed democratic nations still operate on a late- Further, not only is these industries’ underlying model of industrial political model, dividing participants into perpetually exploiting their ownership of intellectual politicians and pundits as producers of democracy, property (and lobbying for ever-longer extensions of journalists, media minders and spin doctors as distributors existing copyright terms) at risk from produsage efforts, of democracy, and ‘average’ citizens as consumers of or but the very idea of copyright itself may also need to be audiences for democracy, scarcely interested to use their rethought. In the context of Wikipedia and other massively ‘remote control’ by voting in national elections every few distributed collaborative efforts there may be the need for a years, a shift towards produsage may revive democratic legal concept of copyright which allows for truly processes by leveling the roles and turning citizens into communally held intellectual property, replacing the active produsers of democracy once again. current model which operates through a difficult meshing The beginnings of this shift may already be visible in the of individually held copyright in individual contributions increasing role of blogs and citizen journalism in recent using complex contracts, or through the artifice of creating elections in the U.S. and elsewhere (notably including also ‘legal persons' (companies, organisations) who hold the influential Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews; copyrights on behalf of groups of creative practitioners. see e.g. [9]). The change from production to produsage in Beyond the obvious question of how these industries may this context is by no means complete, of course – the have to reinvent themselves in order to maintain demise of America’s first mainstream blogger-candidate, profitability, more fundamental issues will also need to be Howard Dean, clearly indicates that success in produsage- addressed, however. Should produsage become a dominant driven environments can still be effectively undermined by paradigm for Generation C, then this raises the specter of a failure in production-based media forms. Similarly, it is new digital divide between those who do and those who do certainly possible, at least in the short term, to deliberately not belong to this Generation (and as Generations X and Y, derail produsage processes by seeding them with mis- and Generation C is of course an aptitude- and attitude- rather disinformation (recent examples of Congressional staff than simply age-based concept). In other words, it is members editing ‘their’ members’ Wikipedia entries in a necessary (especially for educational institutions) to ensure favorable sense must be noted here [5]). that a wide cross-section of society is capable of Just as much as it is questionable whether such disruptive participating effectively in produsage environments. The approaches are sustainable in the longer term, however, it core capacities in this context can be summarized as ‘C4C’: is also important to note that the debates and corrective critical, collaborative, creative, and communicative actions engendered by such interference are themselves capacities which must be able to be exercised especially in indicative of a growing bottom-up produsage-based information and communication technology (ICT) resistance against production-based top-down information environments (see [4]). 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