Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review

The advent of more proactive consumers, the so-called "prosumers", with production and storage capabilities, is empowering the consumers and bringing new opportunities and challenges to the operation of power systems in a market environment. Recently, a novel proposal for the design and operation of electricity markets has emerged: these so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets conceptually allow the prosumers to directly share their electrical energy and investment. Such P2P markets rely on a consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective by giving the opportunity to consumers to freely choose the way they are to source their electric energy. A community can also be formed by prosumers who want to collaborate, or in terms of operational energy management. This paper contributes with an overview of these new P2P markets that starts with the motivation, challenges, market designs moving to the potential future developments in this field, providing recommendations while considering a test-case

Wikipedia and the politics of mass collaboration

Working together to produce socio-technological objects, based on emergent platforms of economic production, is of great importance in the task of political transformation and the creation of new subjectivities. Increasingly, “collaboration” has become a veritable buzzword used to describe the human associations that create such new media objects. In the language of “Web 2.0”, “participatory culture”, “user-generated content”, “peer production” and the “produser”, first and foremost we are all collaborators. In this paper I investigate recent literature that stresses the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, and in particular, works that address the nascent processes of peer production. I contend that this material positions such projects as what Chantal Mouffe has described as the “post-political”; a fictitious space far divorced from the clamour of the everyday. I analyse one Wikipedia entry to demonstrate the distance between this post-political discourse of collaboration and the realities it describes, and finish by arguing for a more politicised notion of collaboration

Against the “networked information economy”: rethinking decentralization, community, and free software development

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The perks and downsides of being a digital prosumer: optimistic and pessimistic approaches to digital prosumption

The recent evolution of users’ position and agency in digital environments absorbs the attention of several scholars in different fields of study. Users’ new ontological status as prosumers, simultaneously producers and consumers, and their role regarding productive paradigms has raised a lot of contrasting opinions. Different discursive techniques are employed to investigate production practices in digital worlds and are often crafted with the conventions of utopian and anti-utopian approaches. Nevertheless, the adoption of optimistic or pessimistic analytical and rhetorical strategies appears to be prejudiced towards the study of emerging online practices. In reality, the analysis of positive and negative approaches to productive paradigms in digital environments results in the detection of their limitations in reaching a comprehensive understanding of the investigated phenomena. Therefore, the adoption of a more neutral perspective is suggested, one that could potentially foster a holistic approach and therefore a broader and deeper comprehension of the analyzed phenomena

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

A citizen journalism primer

Citizen journalism is a hot topic at present, but there remains a degree of conceptual wooliness about its definition and meaning, with everything from lifestyle blogs to live footage of freak weather events being included in this category. This paper will identify factors underpinning the emergence of citizen journalism, including the rise of Web 2.0, rethinking journalism as a professional ideology, the decline of ‘high modernist’ journalism, divergence between elite and popular opinion, changing revenue bases for news production, and the decline of deference in democratic societies. It will consider case studies such as the Korean OhMyNews web site, and connect these issues to wider debates about the implications of journalism and news production increasingly going into the Internet environment

Collaborative planning in non-hierarchical networks - an intelligent negotiation-based framework

In today’s competing business market, companies are constantly challenged to dynamically adapt to customer expectations by diminishing the time response that goes from the beginning of the business opportunity to the satisfaction of the customer need. Simultaneously, there is increased recognition of the advantages that companies obtain in focusing on their core business and seeking other competencies through partnerships with other partners by forming collaborative networks. These new collaborative organizational structures require a new set of methods and tools to support the management of manufacturing processes across the entire supply chain. The present paper addresses the collaborative production planning problem in networks of non-hierarchical, decentralized, and independent companies. By proposing a collaborative planning intelligent framework composed of a web-based set of methods, tools, and technologies, the present study intends to provide network stakeholders with the necessary means to responsively and efficiently address each one of the market business opportunities. Through this new holistic framework, the managers of the networked companies can address the challenges posed during collaborative network formation and supply chain production planning.The research leading to these results received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No. 260169. This work was also financed by national funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project LA/P/0063/2020