Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Chapter 10. Collaborative P2P Spaces

Collaboration is for many what it’s all about, whatever the technology. Many of the innovative aspects of the Internet as a whole evolved as a direct, or sometimes indirect result of people’s desire to collaborate independently of location. Peer technologies are natural to informal collaborations in many ways, and encourage the forming of such coworking groups of people.

Granted that there is no real substitute yet for real physical presence—for example, one can rather easily determine this fact from models such as the “radiative heat” of information flow and how people communicate and work together. Yet people must often work together even in situations when they are physically remote or at variable locations, ...