I do not want to hear 'Production'

As Burns explains, the term ‘production’ is no longer accurate to be the definitive word based on the creation of collaborative content of user-led spaces in the World Wide Web. ‘Production’ is no longer suitable, terms such as ‘customer-made’ or ‘user-led production’ would seem to be the superior choices. This is due to the fact that collaborative user-led spaces such as Wikipedia do not follow simple content production methodology. As Burn explains, User-led content ‘production’ is instead built on iterative, evolutionary development models in which often very large communities of anticipants make a number of usually very small, incremental changes to the established knowledge base, thereby enabling a gradual improvement in quality which under the right conditions can outpace the speed of product development n the conventional and industrial model. The description of this new form of simultaneous production and usage of user-led content can be known as produsage, a model describing today’s emerging user-led content creation environments and the significant removal of a role between a consumer and producer of user-led content.

Burns states that user-led content creation takes place in a variety of environments- ranging from the widely distributed networks (such as the blogosphere) to more centralised sites (such as wikipedia). Coincidentally, the produsage concepts exists within technological and technosocial frameworks of social, technological and economic environments. For Produsage to work, the need for software with functionality beyond what is offered is needed: open source software. Open source software as Burns explains, is built on the principle of the free and open availability code which enables users to switch from the roles of content creators to coordinators. The software ultimately removes the physical limitations that are based on social behaviour such as language, geography, background, etc. The software also allows for environments of distributed tool-sets that pull ends results out of human social and collaborative behaviour, meaning that significant filtering and evaluating of collaborative processes and content will provide harnessing the most successful teams and content contributions.

Snurb explains that the enabling of easily made contribution and usage of the user-led content allows for a great sharing of content, contributions and tasks throughout the networked community, which develops towards the process of collaboration. In which therefore the produsage concept can be seen in a number of key domains that drive the development of user-led online environments. Where the produsage concept is illustrated in the world of social networking, which uses open source software to employ networking tools such as book-marking or publishing blogs. More importantly in my view, knowledge management is another key domain that identifies the produsage concept. Wikipedia, for example, a knowledge management domain, allows for users to act as both consumers and producers of shared knowledge bases; and at the same time, a shared user-led content creation environment is constantly being developed.