Fubica pointed me to an interesting service today which I believe is an exciting exploration of business models that leverage commons-based peer production.

The service is FON, "a community of people making WiFi universal and free", accordingly to the website. The principle is that people buy a sharing-enabled router which has one secured channel (isolated from the owner's) that anyone participating in FON can use to access the Internet. This way, if you share some of your WiFi, you get access to other people's. An extra feature is that the resulting wireless network can be accessed by people not participating in FON, through a fee. The revenues of these accesses are shared between the FON company and the owner of the WiFi spot used.

What I find most exciting, however, is FON's business model. They are not the providers of the WiFi service themselves. Instead, they facilitate it by building the necessary technology (the WiFi routers) and provide an authority which eases access control, allocation of the exceeding resources (which always have a market potential) and billing.

However, I think what is new here is the type of the system and maybe the extent where this business model is being applied, and not the business model.

Looking at a bigger picture, providing enhanced governance for peer production systems is already being explored as a business model. After all, someone does profit from websites like digg and flickr. Thinking a bit more, money is spent to have Planetlab administrators running security among other aspects of the shared platform.

Considering these possibilities in a same framework opens some interesting questions: When is the service provided by an external (centralized?) entity necessary to enhance peer-production systems? How does introducing the economic valuation of the shared service affects the perception contributors have of the system and therefore their behavior? How sustainable is sharing in such conditions, as users start go game the system and try to profit from it?

Not long ago, I came across the fascinating TED website. I didn't have time to explore it as much as I would like yet, but two talks I had time to watch caught my attention as greatly interesting:

The first one is Yochai Benkler on sharing systems. Benkler has some of the most fascinating ideas and analysis of sharing systems, which I have been greatly interested in from the research perspective. I believe the intersection between the perspective of Benkler's work, P2P and grid computing has still a lot to be digged into.

The other nice talk I had the chance to see was Cameron Sinclair's talk on Architecture for humanity. In a nutshell, he has founded an organization which has been applying the ideas of open source development to design in general and creating lots of innovation for acting in disaster relief and humanitary efforts. A great lesson on the potential of sharing for intellectual work and some very interesting points on designing with the needs of communities in mind.

Both worth watching.