a b s t r a c t
This article argues that an autopoietic perspective of human communities would allow to
understand societies as self-organized systems and thus promote information literacy as a
facilitator of social development. Peer-to-peer (P2P) social dynamics generate public information
available worldwide in digital repositories, websites and bibliographic resources.
However, processing such amount of data is not achievable by a single central-controlled
system. We claim that distributed and heterogeneous networks of coordinated mechanisms,
composed by both specialized human and artificial agents, are needed to improve
information retrieval, knowledge inference and decision-making, but also to produce social
value, goods and services. Handling these issues implies the collective construction of global
semantic networks but also the active labor of knowledge producers and consumers. We
conclude that information literacy is as much important as any technical implementation
and, therefore, may lead to networks of Commons-oriented communities which would utilize
P2P infrastructures.