The advent of the Free Software phenomenon paved the way for the emergence of a new form of wealth production, through the sharing and cooperative construction of open information assets. Another striking example of this process is the emergence and accelerated development of Wikipedia, the Open Encyclopedia.

In this talk, we seek to characterize this new form of production, as well as isolate its main features and tools. From another perspective, we will attempt to make plausible the following statement by J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at Berkeley: “Ever since the invention of agriculture, human beings have had only three social-engineering tools for organizing any large-scale division of labor: markets (and the carrots of material benefits they offer), hierarchies (and the sticks of punishment they impose), and charisma (and the promises of rupture they offer). Now there is the possibility of a fourth mode of effective social organization—one that we perhaps see in embryo in the creation and maintenance of open-source software.” This lecture is based on pioneering and highly innovative ideas from Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law at Yale University.

Speaker: Professor Imre Simon, Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, USP.
Discussant: Professor Julio César Jeha, Faculty of Letters, UFMG.