Nika and David both posted nice summaries and applications, but don't forget trade-offs!

• For engagement, we may become so competent in our practice that we lose the ability to see other viewpoints, or recognize when it is worthwhile to step outside of/change the direction of our practice.
• For imagination, we may become ineffectual and disconnected -- basically too off-topic.
• For alignment, we may become autocratic, performing practice in lockstep and becoming disempowered in the process.

Much as in Wenger's example of the two train passengers reading the same newspaper, imagination can offer wiki citizens a sense of community and belonging perhaps from the simple disclosure of statistical trends in their wiki-editing habits. This may "not involve the joint development of a shared practice," but in a wiki it certainly could (Wenger 182).

I was amused by Etienne's insistence that "what we are not can even become a large part of how we define ourselves" (164). As though he needs to tell us this after using it as his modus operandi for the whole of the text. Defining himself by what he is not, over and over again. But I guess it's important to him. I thought David's application of non-participatory analysis to the Fighting 44s was especially well executed.

So, peripherality and marginality (my take, anyways):
Peripherality seems to be more about choosing less-than-full participation, and recognizing that non-participation can support that choice. Marginality (as in marginalization) is more about being prevented from participating fully (when you actually want to) by some from of non-participation. (At Alinsu, the claims processors were - later on in their practice - restricted in their actions by not being able to engage fully with the context of the COB forms.)

I found Wenger's breakdown of trajectories compelling:

• Peripheral trajectories: don't lead to full participation
• Inbound trajectories: newcomers become full participants
• Insider trajectories: members continue to evolve their practice
• Boundary trajectories: "Sustaining an identity across boundaries is one of the most delicate challenges" (Wenger 154). I like that.
• Outbound trajectories: leading out of communities, either by choice or by a process of maturation. This reminded me of graduation, and the notion that we outgrow old shoes. When it is time to leave a place, it is very much time to leave that place, because the shoes are beginning to pinch our feet. In other words, we have been on an outbound trajectory.

As has already been stated, Burkhalter's basic argument is that racism and stereotyping are at least as relevant online as off, and that they may in fact be even more reified in online settings -- where people's "perspectives resist modification" (73). That is, resolving discrepancies by modifying stereotypes is more challenging in the absence of a visible body.

I'm not swayed by the suggestion that Burkhalter's findings wouldn't hold if he were investigating other communities. I guess I just assume that these phenomena, while more overt in racially-focused newsgroups, are at work whenever we interact, regardless of the topic or make-up of the community. A roomful of white men gleefully rhyming along with Snoop Dogg is enacting racial understandings just as much as posters in SCAA.

Theme: The absolute takehome, on page 57, is that we require "a politics not of identities but of envisioned alternatives" (emphasize mine). Only through this new approach could we "bridge identity cleavages without demanding that people dissolve their differences in a pot of assimilation."

In the first chapter, Minnow presents identity politics and individualism, then asks us to take as paradox these conflicting understandings of identity. Hold them both in your heart. Only as we learn to work with paradox can we achieve the "productive stance" toward working with identity in our communities (23). I was especially thankful that we had gotten Wenger's concept of dualities before reading this section.

The paper's basic thesis is that social psychology, sociology and economics can help in designing online communities. Adding on to Yong Mi's great summary, I thought I would hammer on the idea of trade-offs. Ren et al are examining the design implications of online communities as regards common bond ("I'm here for the people") and common identity ("I'm here for the common goal/topic/mission"). Different design choices can target audiences based on either common bond or common identity, and will probably entail tradeoffs as a result. Examples include:

• Constraining to on-topic discussion increases group-identity but decreases opportunities for interpersonal conversation

Brian and I were sitting in Cafe Ambrosia, having a meandering conversation with two accepted students, and he mentioned how many wikis start as extensions of existing physical communities, and only later become more distributed. This seems to tip the general eCommunities model on its head. (ie. Begin with distributed users and then build relationships.) While I don't know the nitty-gritty, we can look to the History of (software) Patterns as one example, over at the Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki. These smaller wikis (as opposed to WikiPedia) are located within a network of FtF interactions that include conferences, overlapping work relationships, etc. As a result of these qualities, small wikis seem to carry a norm of higher levels of warranting.

I think we started this WikiStats business by envisioning that any information we harvested could be displayed on public profiles as a proxy for reputation. As it turns out, the profile information we're designing needs to be a bit more flexible than that. As Kim says when discussing reputation, "Reputation is highly subjective in social interactions. Someone who is annoying to one person could very well be entertaining to another" (110). Similarly for wiki behavior, what is appropriate in one wiki may be inappropriate in another.

We feel like we've isolated a useful measurement -- percent change from one edit to the next.

In his breakdown of constellations, the phrase "diaspora of communities of practice" jumped out at me. I've always been interested in diasporic communities, and I started trying to imagine what this new idea might look like. The closest I could come was when members of some community of practice all move on to some new set of enterprises. Doctoral students of a particular professor, researchers in a particular field at Bell Labs or PARC, etc. They leave whatever situation they were in - where they had been a part of communities of practice defined by strong shared repertoire, mutual engagement, etc... And they go off to other endeavors, forever echoing and carrying with them the residue of their experience, recreating and propagating the original community of practice in new settings.

Blogged my applications over at Jesse's post, but I wanted to add a few odds and ends. When discussing boundary encounters, Wenger notes that members within one community of practice will be negotiating meaning for their own group as well as communicating across boundaries with the other group. This was significant for me in deepening my understanding of negotiation. Where I stand right now is that if I am alone, I am not negotiating meaning in the community of practice. In-class Update: Paul highlights this idea in better language -- that as the lone technology representative at a conference, it's difficult to engage people. But add one more tech-representative, and their engagement calls forth participation from the whole room. But when I am in the community of practice (however tenuous -- could just be reading posts on a message board), I am constantly renegotiating meanings with other participants. Almost without trying; it's just the natural state I am in under those circumstances.