This was an interesting chapter to read because user profiles are all over the place (if anywhere at all) in wiki. That is to say, user names, logins, and profile pages or displays are all inessential features for wiki. (1) There are lots that don't have these capabilities at all. (2) A more common middle ground is to have conventions that approximate user profile displays -- like a page for each regular contributor, maybe with a diary or contact information, or like asking contributors to sign their edits, etc. -- but using no lines of code to implement the conventions. (3) And then, of course, there are wikis with the kinds of user profiles discussed in this chapter.

This paper's 'alternative interpretive frameworks' (pages 554--555) for how people deal with with aspects of physical appearance and behavior that don't come across in online conversations reminded me of our in-class discussion of Sunstein last week. Specifically, even though participants in an online community may never meet, or plan to meet, face to face, I'd expect their activities to be informed by that (imagined) possibility.

Under the expectancy violation option, participants would want to conceal, or at least not be forthcoming about, aspects of themselves that violate expectations of the group. Of course, the game would be up if there was actually a face-to-face meeting. The irrelevance/assimilation option would lead to many kinds of bridging social capital situations (whatever that currently means). I am not sure about indefinite postponement.

The very brief summary of chapter 3

People like listening to and participating in conversations (and media, speech, etc.) with viewpoints similar to their own, and the total increase in information and conversation available online / in other media makes it easy for people to engage with like-minded peers, which leads to groupthink, polarization, and "cybercascades" -- making it even harder than it already is to understand an opposing viewpoint or move towards consensus.

The very brief summary of chapter 4

Shared experiences, knowledge, and tasks provide a "social glue" of common concerns that help people ease into social interactions with one another and develop solidarity. Discussion of solidarity goods and information as public good. The fragmented information environment discussed in chapter 3 leads to fewer shared experiences, hence decreased "social glue" between people; a challenge is issued to develop substitutes for vanishing public forums, etc.

Communities of practice are situated within other kinds of social groupings. Some groupings are too small to be a community of practice (a one-off conversation or meeting), and others are too large (a corporation, city, or state); these groupings may have some, but not all, of the characteristics of communities of practice -- mutual engagement, a shared repertoire, and joint enterprise.

A constellation of practice is a set of practices connected by things they have in common, such as history, enterprise, membership, etc.; the boundaries between these practices are active, and and membership in a constellation of practice will help define locality and proximity within groups. These are the people you "feel close to," and Wenger is careful to note that this proximity doesn't necessarily have to follow physical distance, affiliations, or regular activities. Constellations of practices is a way of talking about larger groupings that aren't communities per se, but can enrich our understanding of boundaries and peripheries in communities of practice.

This chapter describes the boundary relationships between communities of practice; the next chapter situates communities of practice within the larger world, and other kinds of social configurations.

Duality of boundary relations

Wenger discusses how participation, reification, and communities themselves can act as boundaries, and how boundaries can reacted against -- and connected across. Individual participation crosses boundaries through multimembership: the idea that, since people belong to multiple communities of practice, they will at least some potential to coordinate between the communities. Reified forms also participate in multiple communities of practice; Wenger calls such a reification a nexus of perspectives, since the reification has different roles and meanings across the communities that share it.

On behalf of Lev, Michael, me.

Drupal has kindly munged the filename of the TeX version, but the PDF is probably what you would like to read anyways.

Summary

Subgroups will self-organize within a community. Kim asserts that these subgroups have the same needs as communities in general, and provides several strategies for encouraging people to form subgroups, including a link back to Oldenberg's "third place."

Online communities can and should foster the development of subgroups. Kim suggests a "subgroup program" and discusses how, and when, to create one. This discussion occupies the second half of the chapter.

Finally, participants can feel a stronger identifaction with a subgroup than with the community as a whole; the subgroup may want to leave and/or do its own thing. For Kim, this is a bad thing since it disrupts the revenue stream; she suggests strategies for encouraging subgroups to stay around.

warning: boring

This has always been my favorite chapter of this book. Closing a project is tough, and even though Powazek doesn't have any magic bullets, I think his exhortation to really think about what you're doing. One problem with wiki is that they can grind to a halt (for one of the first three reasons in Powazek's list on pp 246-47) but remain online and stagnate. Hey, need to improve your pagerank? Just spam an abandoned wiki with links to your page (and pages that link to your page, and...)! So this is definitely a concern.

In general

Over at Wiki Index (a project to catalog public wikis, disclaimer: started by a good friend of mine) there are 1200 wikis listed, but only four have "reached their goal" -- that is, the participants met their goal but left the wiki available as a public archive. We don't know how many public wikis would count as having reached their goal, but are offline. Compare these, however to the 62 wikis which "need love" -- that is, which are public, editable, but neglected by everybody but spammers. There is also conversation about a more inclusive definition of "needs love" by which another one or two hundred wikis could fall into that category.

This looks like a pretty old document; the earliest version identical to the assigned "text" that I could find was posted in 1994. At least in my experience, the nature of e-mail lists have changed to compensate for some of the unstabilities hinted at in the text. This usually involves a heroic person like David Farber or Steve Champeon working to keep the noise level down, either by moderating the entire list (as in Interesting People) or by taking responsibility for policing, etc. (as in webdesign-l). These fairly rigid lists do have an overall trajectory, but the entry and exit (possibly "assisted" exit in case of spammers and bozos) paths for individual participants are pretty well-defined and easy.