Critique and Connections
I feel like I'm piling on, but add my voice to the chorus that is confused as to why Usenet lurkers are free riding to the detriment of the community. The distinction between users who lurk to enjoy the content others post and users who actively work to use up the bandwidth of the community (through spamming, flames, etc) is important. Unfortunately I think the two ideas are conflated in this paper.

The idea of attentional bandwidth is worth exploring. It's easy to imagine a community being unable to practice due to a massive volume of spam being posted to the list, for example. The role of moderation is key here. Slashdot is again an informative (ha, +1) study of how moderation can free up attentional bandwidth for its users.

I agree with Jesse that the main takeaway of this chapter are that enforcing rules online is exceedingly difficult in an environment in which people can adopt new identities easily. It was frustrating not knowing how exactly the MUD she studied worked on a technological level.

Connections and Application
I was reminded of Powazek's discussion of barriers to entry. I like Jesse's suggestion of an accumulating privilege system, a mechanism that deters people from defecting (to borrow a 502 phrase) and becoming disruptive. While this technology may not have been possible in the early 1990s in the system Smith used, I think it's important to understand that simple registration systems are often effective barriers to entry, even if they require nothing more than an easily faked email address.

I for one wish there would have been more discussion of Billy Bratworst in this chapter. Alas...

One of the important takeaways of this chapter (and the previous one) is the role of attribution in an online community. Powazek talks around this a bit, referring to a "people-positive attitude." Attribution is a concept I'm borrowing from 688--essentially it states that people are more likely to modify behavior when a positive behavior is attributed to them (as opposed to being persuaded to do something). eBay's "we believe people are basically good" is an attribution of a positive characteristic; stating it as "please be a good person" would be less likely to achieve the desired effect, at least according to the psychological literature.

Description
Policies and policing, disclaimers and moderation. Powazek discusses various methods for ensuring that one's community is both legal and habitable. The methods are pretty straightforward, and are probably much less novel to the community designer of 2006 than they were to the community designer of 2001. Registration is largely taken for granted now, whether for purposes of marketing or just because it's become somewhat of a norm for online discussions.

Critique and Connections
There are a couple of head-scratchers in this piece (DMCA compliance is easy?), but I wanted to focus on this question: Is member-posted content the responsibility of the site owner, as Powazek claims? Slashdot claims that all content is the property of the person who posted it, which is a model that makes the most sense to me intuitively. Is ownership of community content online still a gray area legally?

Wenger uses language so carefully in presenting his arguments that I find it difficult to restate his arguments in my own terms. I'll give it a shot though: in this chapter Wenger describes the component of time as essential to the process of learning; learning over time forms communities of practice. A more detailed summary, in bullet form:

Forms of memory

• Over time, remembering and forgetting, continuity and discontinuity, and the politics involved with weilding participation and reification activities shape the shared history of learning in a community
• These "dual constitutions of memory" interact but do not weld together

"The C, F, and J thing" struck me as the perfect example of why reification and participation should never be thought of as substitutes for one another. In this case, the CFJ form is offered to claims processors as a reification of a complex process by which insurance coverage is aggregated over the course of a year. One problem: the claims processors, having had no participation in the creation of the form (and only a vague understanding of the aggregation process itself), have no clue what it means. What's worse, they're expected to explain it to angry customers. Ouch.

The consequences of introducing the form are significant: angry customers who no doubt think terrible things about Alinsu talk with frustrated and confused employees who struggle to explain the results of the form to them.

As Brian pointed out, the vignette gave me much richer information after I had read Wenger's first two chapters. That said, I did read it linearly at first but found myself flipping back and forth between the vignette and concepts discussed in the first two chapters. I was impressed with the level of detail as well as the realism of the scenario. Kudos to Wenger for doing his homework and presenting such a lucid scenario for us to reference throughout the book.

I took Paul Edwards's advice on how to read a book and spent a fair amount of time thinking about the context that helped Wenger produce this vignette.

Description
In order to develop his idea of communities of practice, Wegner needs to identify how people construct meaning. He asserts that "practice is about meaning as an experience of everyday life." In other words, I think he's saying that one has to understand how people make meaning in their daily activities if one wants to understand the practices in which these people are engaged.

He argues three things in this chapter:
1. A process he calls "negotiation of meaning" is what creates meaning
2. Two processes called participation and reification interact during negotiation of meaning. Participation is participation; reification is the process by which norms, mores, or a cultural environment become objectified (the claim from Vignette I is an example of a reified object).

Description
In the second chapter, Wenger attempts to more fully explain his idea of community. He is interested in showing that practice and community are inextricably linked (as "community of practice"). Toward this assertion, Wegner offers three dimensions that explain how coherence emerges in a community of practice:
1. Mutual engagement
2. Joint enterprise
3. Shared repertoire

Mutual engagement
Mutual engagement is the term Wenger gives to the concept of membership within a community. Membership, importantly, is not strictly defined as those one interacts with. Rather, it is the many paths of relationships in a community, through which information flows.