Hmm, PDF via Google

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This paper gave me some hints for thinking about why there are many rites of passage and so forth in highly structured wiki, such as Wikipedia (large example) or Wiki Index (small example), and few or none in less structured wiki. Extrinsic rewards -- such as being thanked, affirmed, having your work recognized or improved -- detract (or distract) from the intrinsic motivation that contributors bring to the wiki. Much of the structure of a few strange wikis I can now recognize as trying to attract intrinsically-motivated persons and then help them hang onto their autonomy within the space.

The first half of this chapter is a workshop-style discussion of policy issues in online communities:

1. what kind of policies to establish for participants,
2. suggestions for how and where to display policies, and
3. examples (from old versions of Powazek's personal site and the Blogger comment interface) of how to integrate policies into the interfaces participants will use.

The second half of the chapter introduces the role of host. Powazek asserts that every web community has a host, which he describes as a well-defined role (distinct from a site's designers or developers). There are some examples of host activities, and a hint to make sure that the host's activities are visually distinguished in some way from the activities of others. I thought this section was a bit wordy and narrowly-focused on e-mail list or bulletin-board sites, but I did find this quote from p. 106 helpful:

This (short) chapter gives a general case for building moderation or access control features into an online community site, with examples from Kvetch or Slashdot. The perspective Powazek presents is a continuation from the Policies and Policing chapter, in that moderation and other tools are discussed only as a way to reduce or eliminate antisocial behavior.

Of course, moderation can be used as a reward for pro-social behavior -- as is being attempted by the design of this course site. This doesn't come up in this chapter, or elsewhere in the book (that I could find).

This is a strange paper about usenet. It was published three years after the September that never ended, but doesn't seem to reflect the fact that the character of a lot of usenet groups was changing around that time. Usenet's popularity skyrocketed due to AOL (and more recently, Google) offering usenet access to its relatively huge number of subscribers in ways that weren't respectful of usenet conventions (including some conventions discussed in the paper). The paper also quotes the jargon file, crediting Eric Raymond as author. So there seems to be a general lack of "netiquette" or understanding of usenet's audiences over time in the paper.

Since I'm first to bat blog on this reading, I'll just summarize:

Pro-social behavior is defined as "voluntary intentional behavior that results in benefits for another" (2); this includes easy things -- such as cash or CPU cycle donations -- and hard things -- such as sharing time, attention, or knowledge.

The chapter looks at the situation of pro-social behavior in public online discussion groups. Social learning and social identification are invoked to explain what motivates online discussion group participants to behave pro-socially.

(since I am at RecentChangesCamp this weekend, I felt like it would be fun to just supply the notes on this chapter I made in my PersonalWiki.)

Mutual engagement in pursuit of joint enterprise leads to learning. "CommunitiesOfPractice can be thought of as shared histories of learning." (p. 86)

Persistence of reified forms can lead to remembering and forgetting. The AmbiguityOfObjects = reinterpretation and MultipleInterpretation.

Identity and interpretation of participation (in memory) creates continuity, trajectory, etc. May be false or incomplete.

In case anybody hasn't started the reading yet, I found the vignettes a lot more valuable after I had worked through the first two chapters. It's fun to read through and look for illustrations of Wenger's key concepts at work in the vignettes.