It's very possible I'm missing something, but the distinction between the two parts of this chapter seemed fairly clear to me, at least in the sense that the first part concerns situations in which a person is basically free to determine his or her level of participation in relationship to a community.

But the institutions of the second part are taking away an important part of that voluntarism. The most obvious example would be, of course, a person's need for a steady paycheck or for benefits which effectively removes their ability to end membership in the community of their place of work--unless they're willing to risk a potentially serious period of financial instability and uncertainty. There seems to be a real difference here.

I found Wenger's point that old-timers may not necessarily be knee-jerk defenders of tradition and newcomers may not necessarily be hostile toward that  tradition to be a useful caution against making assumptions about the roles people take in a community. It makes sense that while some long-standing members of a community may become overly vested in established practice, others may challenge that practice from inside. I'm reminded of exceptional scientists like Richard Feynmann who seem to delight in seeing established traditions overthrown (provided better ones replace them), even if they themselves had a part in creating those traditions.

Something else that emerges from Walther's discussion of warrant (pp. 550-556) is the great delicacy required to move a friendship from online contact to a first F2F meeting. Warranting must proceed gradually, and preferably through different channels, step-by-step, or else the first physical meeting might upset too many preconceived expectations on both sides. Thus while online relationships may be prone to hyperpersonal effects (either positive or negative), the potential effect of a first F2F meeting might be even more extreme if both parties haven't tempered the relationship with at least partial warranting by that point. (I wonder how many people must have learned this the hard way in recent years?)

Cummings et al. have already received a well-deserved skewering by my classmates, and I agree with the comments above that the problem lies with how they framed their study. If anything, their reliance on listservs, their focus on media and frequency of communication rather than the content and quality of those communications, and their ham-handed distinction between 'online' and 'offline' relationships suggests this study was out-of-date before it was conducted (as late as 2002, no less). 

I don't really see much use for this study in regard to Milliways. Yes, many members of the Milliways community make efforts to meet in real life ('Milli-cons'), which may suggest they place greater value on friendships that persist across modes of communication. However, any study that takes a similar approach to Milliways must account for the fact that, 1) it is the strength of online communication that inspires the desire  to meet face-to-face, and 2) most players in Milliways joined the community at the recommendation of someone they already knew, either online or in real-life. The categories used in the Cummings study are simply not nuanced enough to offer a useful model of the Milliways community or the kinds of communication its members exchange.

I'm not sure I follow Jesse's apparent distinction between self-selection and group polarization. Rather than a condition imposed by an experimenter, in my reading of Sunstein, polarization takes place precisely because the members have self-selected. The one tends to lead to the other. 

I do agree, however, that multiple affiliations should undermine polarization in regard to any one issue or set of issues. I found chapter four a bit odd because Sunstein seems to be aware that people have more than one set of interests in their lives, but he doesn't seem to acknowledge the potential of that fact to influence how people filter their experiences.

It's interesting to consider Putnam from the perspective of this class because for me his work has always been bound firmly to American generational politics and culture since 1960. That has tended to be the focus of discussions about his book, like this one from Slate between Putnam and "Reason" magazine's Nick Gillespie:  < http://www.slate.com/id/2000177/entry/1005495/ >, and I think Ayca's comments are a good start toward discussing this dimension of Putnam's arguments.

Putnam has written a follow-up called Better Together (see Amazon). I haven't had a chance to read it, but my understanding is that it considers several examples of people trying to build new communities. One of these is craigslist, but the majority of his examples are drawn from 'real-life' groups that bring people together physically for the purpose of engaging with and improving their local communities (school boards, better roads, zoning issues, urban sprawl).

Kim emphasizes repeatedly in this chapter that moderators should be supportive of bottom-up groups and do as much as they can to encourage the sense of ownership among members that these groups imply. At the same time, he cautions that introducing subgroups too early or not providing adequate support for them may result in a significant portion of the community's membership departing for another place on the net. This is quite a delicate balance for a moderator to maintain.

The link to Oldenberg was very useful for clarifying the role groups can play in very large communities, and I particularly liked Kim's discussion of the WELL's multi-tiered program which distinguishes featured, independent, and private conferences. Adopting this approach would give moderators great flexibility in allowing groups to grow or fade organically over time.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this my favorite chapter of the book, but I was impressed to find Powazek addressing a topic that I suspect most other authors would forget. I thought his discussion of the ending of communities was very humane and considerate toward both the members, who stand to lose something they may value a great deal, and the moderator/founder who must make a difficult decision.

I was not very happy while reading this chapter, because my great worry for Milliways is that someday the use of canon-based characters will bring it some very unwelcome attention from a media conglomerate. While I like to think the community is being smart about staying within the boundaries of fair use, many fan sites have been taken down in recent years, and it's not hard to imagine Milliways coming to an abrupt end as well.

Powazek's 'bad assumptions' are useful for encouraging a reevaluation of barriers, though given our previous discussions about the value of stickiness and the need to keep people engaged with a community, our class is probably not as in need of that rethinking as someone coming to the book independently might be.

Milliways has a very formal barrier to entry in the form of the approval process which every new player (or new character) must go through in order to be allowed into the community. As I mention in my second paper, I believe this helps to raise the expectations of players about what degree of commitment the community expects from its members.