ABSTRACT
The possibility of using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking for interorganizational collaboration has recently been attracting increasing attention. The term P2P refers to the concept that, in a network of equals (peers) using appropriate information and communication systems, two or more individuals are able to spontaneously collaborate without necessarily needing central coordination (Barkai 2001, Schoder and Fischbach 2003). P2P extends our means of accessing and utilizing distributed resources, such as information, as well as bandwidth, storage, knowledge, files, and central processing unit (CPU) cycles. Ideally, the corresponding technologies and applications take advantage of fully decentralized architectures. Largely independent of central institutions, P2P computing appears to hold great promise with regard to information management, for example, it can accelerate communication processes, increase the exchangeability of up-to-date and decentralized information, reduce collaboration costs, exploite idle resources, and offer individual users a higher degree of emancipation (Barkai 2001, Oram 2001). Thanks to the continuously declining costs for storage and transport of digital information, together with the availability of 3G mobile networks, P2P computing is expected to become a “ubiquitous” part of our technical, economic, and social life (Cerf 2001).
