“[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.”

“The systemic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.”

“Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.”

“Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.”

“[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.”

“Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.”

“[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.”