Co-Production on the Web: Social Software as a Means of Collaborative Value Creation in Web-based Infrastructures

The concept of co-production was originally introduced by political science to explain citizen participation in the provision of public goods. The concept was quickly adopted in business research targeting the question how users could be voluntarily integrated into industrial production settings to improve the development of goods and services on an honorary basis. With the emergence of the Social Software and web-based collaborative infrastructures the concept of co-production gains importance as a theoretical framework for the collaborative production of web content and services. This article argues that co-production is a powerful concept, which helps to explain the emergence of user generated content and the partial transformation of orthodox business models in the content industries. Applying the concept of co-production to developmental policies could help to theorize and derive new models of including underprivileged user groups and communities in collaborative value creation on the web for the mutual benefit of service providers and users.