GoodLabs is a hub for social production providing creators and contributors with a community, personalized online workspaces, and data-driven insights to help them better understand and improve upon their operations.
People have shown a tremendous willingness to invest their free time and energy contributing to projects that don’t benefit them financially. This “cognitive surplus”–the free time that people have on their hands to engage in collaborative activities–has the potential to realize vast stores of social value that the traditional marketplace tends to neglect.
Modern technologies like the internet, along with more recent innovations like distributed version control, have opened a pathway to more fully realize this value, but dependence on a still ad hoc, fragmented infrastructure means we’re not being as efficient or effective with this resource as we could be.
This project is about removing the barriers that keep social production flowing at a trickle instead of a stream and providing a more robust, integrated core infrastructure to service this growing community of amateur creators and contributors.
The term social production is used here to denote a mixture of the following two concepts:
“Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a new model of socioeconomic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively (usually over the Internet). Commons-based projects generally have less rigid hierarchical structures than those under more traditional business models. Often—but not always—commons-based projects are designed without a need for financial compensation for contributors. The term is often used interchangeably with the term social production.” (Peer Production, P2PF Wiki)
"Social production is found when people take the initiative to pose solutions to the problems arising from their living conditions. Partners in social production can be informal groups or local organizations, and/or other actors external to the community, such as NGOs, donors, private sector enterprises, cooperatives, professional associations, academics or government institutions, or any combination of these." (Social Production of Habitat, Wikipedia)
The development of the GoodLabs platform is a grassroots effort supported primarily through the GoodLabs Community. Join us there to contribute to our effort!