Open2Edit: A peer-to-peer platform for collaboration

Peer-to-peer systems owe much of their success to user contributed resources like storage space and bandwidth. At the same time, popular collaborative systems like Wikipedia or StackExchange are built around user-contributed knowledge, judgement, and expertise. In this paper, we combine peer-to-peer and collaborative systems to create Open2Edit, a peer-to-peer platform for collaboration. Open2Edit provides the means for users to publish, modify, comment on, and categorize content. Content-centric collaboration in Open2Edit takes place within communities. A flexible permission system allows each community to customize the privileges users receive for interacting with content. Any user can create a new community, and Open2Edit facilitates their discovery. Furthermore, Open2Edit allows users to vote for communities, and keeps track of community popularity. We deploy Open2Edit in Tribler, a BitTorrent-based peer-to-peer application, in order to create a YouTube-like media sharing system. Through Open2Edit, users in Tribler can collaboratively improve media metadata using a wiki-Iike approach. We present results from 7.5 months of usage that show Open2Edit is a viable, sustainable platform that leads to the emergence of collaboration.