Produsage

Produsage is a common term now being used when terms like DIY media and collaboration are mentioned. A term defined Snurb at produsage.org as “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.” According to Snurb there are four preconditions of produsage:

“1. Open participation, communal evaluation

2. Fluid Heterarchy

3. Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process

4. Common Property, Individual Rewards”

The first precondition means that the more people participate, the more input and therefore better quality of output information. Everyone has different skills, ideas and knowledge and as each person brings this to the process of produsage, a broader understanding can be developed with the continual process of contributing through evaluation. The second precondition means that everyone’s contribution is valuable as together all the contributions become equal and therefore better quality is revealed. The process allows users to work at the same time as each other in their contributions.

The third precondition means that people can continually add, change, evaluate and update the content and therefore the process remains continually unfinished. This way there are gradual developments to the communities shared content. The fourth precondition means that content created must always remain available to present and future participates for evaluations and updates. If these four preconditions are met then the creative content remains a part of produsage content for the community to share and learn from.

Brunes talks abut the advantages and disadvantages of produsage in his podcast Produsage. He identifies three advantages, “faster more frequent updates…greater involvement of the community…and outcomes are available to all.” This means that there are fewer delays which would normally be caused by editing and upgrading, can be made immediately. The community interests are represented by a more diverse range of user and shared development means shared ownership as a community. The disadvantages Brunes identifies are, “mistaken updates may be made available…community knowledge may be limited…and communities may have internal disagreements.” This means that there is potential room for errors to be included as there is no real editing completed and the community may not support the views of minority groups.