here's the good stuff!

Chapter 6 presents an introduction of identity as how we see the world in ways that are shaped by our involvement in a community of practice. We interweave various aspects of the community of practice to form our identity:

• Negotiated experience
• Community membership
• Learning trajectory
• Nexus of multimembership
• A relationship between the global and local

Others have already blogged about (or drawn!) what these mean in the author's view, so I am going to apply them to one of the communities I have been studying, Geocaching.com.

Negotiated experience
Geocachers indicate their identity with the geocaching movement by participating in the practice of geocaching. They identify with a particular way of treasure hunting using specific artifacts and sense of adventure. This differs from those who wander aimlessly through the woods and happen to find a treasure or interesting place they haven't seen before. By being a geocacher, one identifies as someone who is on a hunt for interesting locations, for history, for nature using artifacts such as GPS data and written hints. These artifacts reify what it means to geocache, and represent the contributions that members have made as they define their identity in the community.

In this chapter, Wenger focuses on identity in terms of three modes of belonging that do not directly involve engagement in practice: engagement, imagination, and alignment. Wenger's argument here is that our identity does not just exist within the confines of belonging to our community of practice ("I belong to the Alinsu claims processing group"), but that it extends to the broader social realm in which we exist ("I belong to the field of claims processing"). To feel belongingness at such a global level, members:

• are actively involved in a mutual process of negotiation of meaning
• extrapolate from their own experiences to imagine how their social world exists
• align their energy and activities to fit within this broader social world

More about each of these follows:

On page 31, the author says:

"Perhaps identity becomes important when it becomes a question. It often becomes a question when individuals and groups are mobile and able to change some of their identifying traits. When people come into frequent contact with others unlike themselves, they can both heighten and put in jeopardy their sense of distinctiveness."

This quote was, for me, the central connection between this reading and online communities. Does participating in an online community put us on the path of needing to form an identity, to feel distinct? I think in most communities this is certainly the case, even where the central theme of the community is not racial/social/gender/other identification. For instance, the most active private forum I am involved in is 99% white, with one lone woman who identifies herself as Mexican-American and a "Southern belle". Her identity is clearly important to her because she uses it as an explanation for why she acts or thinks differently than some of the other members (somewhat reinforcing what Smith's article stated), and she only directly references her identity when she feels that it is being threatened by comments made by with the largely white, Northern female contingent in the forum. She is at the same time affirming her individuality while also adhering to several group stereotypes, proudly.

This article summarized a variety of research on common identity and common bond; notably, how they are created, the purposes they serve in different communities (ie: why we want to create/sustain them), and how design can support or hinder them. The main thrust of this paper is that "social science theory can point to how a design decision is likely to satisfy and encourage people with different reasons for community participation" and that different structures for communication meet different types of needs (3).

The authors start with the following definitions of member/group needs:

I found this article to be largely, uh, daunting to read, in that it just seemed to summarize tons and tons of research that contradicted each other. When I got to the discussion of warranting, however, I finally felt like I had something to take away from the reading. The concept of warranting certainly relates significantly to my interest in studying how displaying a history of community participation in user profiles can help to develop trust, strengthen a community's vision, and help members form relationships with one another.

Walther and Parks present warranting as a way of connecting one's online persona to one's real-life existence. This is important because, in online communities, members need to feel that others are who they say they are, that they can be held accountable, that they are worth being trusted and included in a relationship in the community-- yet it's often a mystery how one can tell for sure if someone is who they say they are without tracking them down in person and verifying their identity. The authors thus present some findings on how online personas can be connected to the corporeal self. For instance:

Holy crap-- gold stars to Jesse for that insightful post!

This paper presents a few main ideas about why the Internet can be a good place for people to form strong relationships. If we take these ideas for face value, ignoring the authors' dubious association of them with people who are lonely and depressed, they do provide some valuable insights to consider:

• The Internet can produce a greater degree of intimacy and closeness because of the anonymity it affords; people do not need to worry about sharing personal information that will be attached to their physical identity
• The Internet enables people to socialize regardless of social stigmas that may limit socialization in face to face interaction
• The Internet brings together groups of people with similar interests who may otherwise never get to meet

The challenge in this all working out is in one's ability to locate and define one's "actual self" either online or offline. The author attempts to show that people who have a well defined "actual self" in the online world do quite well at forming relationships on the Internet. The problem here is clearly that there isn't a good way to gauge and locate this concept of "actual self"-- I may know that the way I present myself online and offline are different, and I may have a sense of which one is more "me" but that does not mean that this one is my "actual self." It could still be lacking quite a bit, even if it's more "me" than my other ways of presenting myself. I'm just having a hard time wrapping my mind around this.

It was interesting to read this article from Cummings et al after reading McKenna's article on how online communication can improve social involvement and psychological well being. I agree with others on here-- Cummings' use of listservs as a comparison point is poorly executed, as listservs embody a very one-way interaction with people and information. As I was reading this article, I started thinking about the discussion forums I'm involved in where there's a high level of back-and-forth conversation with a high degree of closeness obvious between members. Such communities are much more like the membership size and change, communication volume and structure, and participation levels of traditional small groups that Cummings contrasts with listservs (107)-- a core membership base that does not fluctuate, frequent communication, messages almost always receiving at least one response, and more than just a few core active participants. Large discussion forums even have their own cliques much like large social circles in face-to-face interaction. 

This chapter was very applicable to my project for this class, as it discussed how profile information helps support a community by providing a snapshot of users' personality and contributions as well as examples of what the community values and how it operates. Further, by showing how members contribute to the community, trust is strengthened and relationships are able to flourish, as members' "impact and reputation is directly tied to their actions" (107).

The author points out many considerations for supporting user profiles, such as:

• Make sure personal information and privacy is protected
• Use profile information to enhance the value that members get out of the community, such as to support collaborative filtering and recommender systems, targeted ads or news, and personalized start pages
• Give members some ability to customize their profiles via free-form fields
• Encourage members to keep profile information up-to-date , such as by highlighting recently updated profiles in a visible part of the community and sending reminder messages

Certainly, enough information needs to be collected in profiles to make them useful to members, but community developers should not collect more information than is needed to support the community's vision. Requiring too much information can scare away prospective members who are wary of trustworthiness or who simply do not want to go through such a daunting process.

McKenna et al's article on relationship formation on the internet provides a good comparison point for Kim's discussion of profiles here. Profile information is one way in which people in online communities are able to display their "absolute Real Me" to emphasize their positive characteristics while also hiding the traits that may otherwise make socialization difficult in face-to-face interaction.

Application to Geo-Aware Communities
The observations I have made so far in Geocaching.org certainly support Kim's ideas for designing profiles. Geocachers have the opportunity to express themselves through profile information that is important to the community, such as where one resides, caches one has contributed, and caches one has visited. It also provides freeform space for members to write more personalized messages to readers, and to include pictures directly in this profile information.

The Sonstein chapters provided a good example of how joint enterprise works in online communities. Online communities come together for a common cause-- whether it be a particular political stance, social status, or musical preference-- and the single act of coming together for that cause creates a long-lasting joint enterprise. As a result, online communities tend to be rather polarized in their views. The joint enterprise shared by members encourages them to speak up about the views with which they know others in the community will agree; those in the minority who disagree, however, will generally keep silent or remove themselves from the community. The author considers this polarization to have both positive and negative effects on information sharing:

Positives of polarized online communities: