Group items tagged

First, this is not actually a philanthropic endeavor in the classic sense of "donating" something to those with less. Instead, the open education movement promotes conditions for self-empowerment, and one of the central premises of the movement focuses on the freedom to be educated in the manner of one's choosing. Second, the permissions granted in defining an open educational resource explicitly enable the localization and adaptation of materials to be more locally appropriate. Every person should have the right to be educated in his/her native language, and in a manner that is most suitable to the personal and cultural contexts in which they reside. Third, we have good reason to believe that the contributions to the global open educational enterprise from those in resource-limited settings are at least as valuable as contributions from anyone else. While we have much to do to enable truly equitably participation among all of the citizens of the globe, there is widespread agreement that the ultimate goal is some type of open educational network, not a unidirectional pipeline.

educational resources commissioned and paid for directly by the public sector should be released as open educational resources. This ensures that the taxpayers who financed these resources can benefit from them fully. Of course, this principle cannot extend to resources paid for indirectly with public funds, such as materials written by professors at public universities. The Declaration does strongly encourage these professors and institutions to make all of their resources open. However, in the end, this is their choice.

resources should be licensed to facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone

many of the participants advocated for inclusion of language that indicates that the license should ideally impose no legal constraints other than a requirement by the creator for appropriate attribution or the sharing of derivative works. This degree of openness represents the 'gold standard' in open educational resource licensing. However, it is also recognized that some authors and publishers may wish to disallow commercial uses (non-commercial). Resources licensed with this additional restriction are still open educational resources, but do come with risks and costs.

we suggest that you use one of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, for several reasons: The licenses have human-readable deeds, which is (generally) easier for people to understand.The licenses have a computer-readable component which enables search and filtering by license status, an increasingly important consideration in an era of exploding online content.The licenses have been ported to many countries around the world, with more being added every year, which guarantees their worldwide application and enforcement.The licenses are already the most frequently used licenses for open educational resources, which will make it easier for users to learn about their rights, as well as use the materials in interesting ways.

If an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for it to be used as widely, freely, and creatively as possible, then using CC-BY is the better choice

n most cases, the NC term is likely to have undesired repercussions for your work. If you are thinking of restricting commercial activity, ask yourself the following questions: What is the goal of doing so? Is it that the creators wish to make money from their contributions? Is this likely? Is it assumed that all for-profit activity is somehow inimical to education? What are the costs of restricting commercial use of open educational resources and do you wish to incur them? For example, is it your goal to forbid a for-profit publisher in a developing country from printing copies of your materials and distributing them there?

Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY have no restrictions on use beyond attribution for the original creator. Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY-SA also require attribution, but have the additional restriction of requiring that the derived material be licensed in the same manner as the original(s), thus ensuring their continued availability as open educational resources.

CC-BY allows for a variety of motivations, including the possibility of commercial success, to drive users to adapt and re-purpose their materials.

f an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for that material to never leave the educational commons, such as it is, then you may want to apply the SA term. In this case, the possibilities for viable commercial derivatives, though not disallowed, are diminished, and so users motivated to adapt materials for that purpose are unlikely to participate. In addition, open educational resources licensed with an SA term are only interoperable with other SA materials, which seriously limits their capacity for re-mixing.

There are two key points we would ask you to consider prior to applying the ND term. First, are you willing to prevent all of the wonderful ways in which your work might be improved upon just for the sake of preventing a few derivatives that you would consider inferior? It is worth remembering that it is the granting of freedoms to share, reprint, translate, combine, or adapt that makes open educational resources educationally different from those that can merely be read online for free.

you must remember that digital resources are not consumable goods, in the sense that they can be shared infinitely without any loss of value for the original. As such, if inferior derivatives are created, those creations have done nothing to diminish the quality of your original work, which will remain available for others to use or improve upon as they wish.

there is absolutely no restriction on use of public domain materials. In addition to being able to freely use such materials, you are free to adapt public domain materials and then license the derivative works in any way you choose, including standard all-rights-reserved copyright. You have to apply an open license if you want your contribution to add to the pool of open educational resources.

It is true that blogs are Web pages, but their reverse-chronological structure implies a different rhetorical purpose than a Web page, which has no inherent timeliness. That altered rhetoric helped shape a different audience, the blogging public, with its emergent social practices of blogrolling, extensive hyperlinking, and discussion threads attached not to pages but to content chunks within them. Reading and searching this world is significantly different from searching the entire Web world. Still, social software does not indicate a sharp break with the old but, rather, the gradual emergence of a new type of practice.

Rather than following the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation. Podcasts are shuttled between Web sites, RSS feeds, and diverse players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects. Browsers respond to this boom in microcontent with bookmarklets in toolbars, letting users fling something from one page into a Web service that yields up another page. AJAX-style pages feed content bits into pages without reloading them, like the frames of old but without such blatant seams. They combine the widely used, open XML standard with Java functions.3 Google Maps is a popular example of this, smoothly drawing directional information and satellite imagery down into a browser.

Web 2.0 builds on this original microcontent drive, with users developing Web content, often collaboratively and often open to the world.

openness remains a hallmark of this emergent movement, both ideologically and technologically.

Drawing on the “wisdom of crowds” argument, Web 2.0 services respond more deeply to users than Web 1.0 services. A leading form of this is a controversial new form of metadata, the folksonomy.

Third, people tend to tag socially. That is, they learn from other taggers and respond to other, published groups of tags, or “tagsets.”

First, users actually use tags.

Social bookmarking is one of the signature Web 2.0 categories, one that did not exist a few years ago and that is now represented by dozens of projects.

This is classic social software—and a rare case of people connecting through shared metadata.

RawSugar (http://www.rawsugar.com/) and several others expand user personalization. They can present a user’s picture, some background about the person, a feed of their interests, and so on, creating a broader base for bookmark publishing and sharing. This may extend the appeal of the practice to those who find the focus of del.icio.us too narrow. In this way too, a Web 2.0 project learns from others—here, blogs and social networking tools.

How can social bookmarking play a role in higher education? Pedagogical applications stem from their affordance of collaborative information discovery.

First, they act as an “outboard memory,” a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner’s (or owners’) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students’ progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor’s discoveries.

After e-mail lists, discussion forums, groupware, documents edited and exchanged between individuals, and blogs, perhaps the writing application most thoroughly grounded in social interaction is the wiki. Wiki pages allow users to quickly edit their content from within the browser window.11 They originally hit the Web in the late 1990s (another sign that Web 2.0 is emergent and historical, not a brand-new thing)

How do social writing platforms intersect with the world of higher education? They appear to be logistically useful tools for a variety of campus needs, from student group learning to faculty department work to staff collaborations. Pedagogically, one can imagine writing exercises based on these tools, building on the established body of collaborative composition practice. These services offer an alternative platform for peer editing, supporting the now-traditional elements of computer-mediated writing—asynchronous writing, groupwork for distributed members

Blogging has become, in many ways, the signature item of social software, being a form of digital writing that has grown rapidly into an influential force in many venues, both on- and off-line. One reason for the popularity of blogs is the way they embody the read/write Web notion. Readers can push back on a blog post by commenting on it. These comments are then addressable, forming new microcontent. Web services have grown up around blog comments, most recently in the form of aggregation tools, such as coComment (http://www.cocomment.com/). CoComment lets users keep track of their comments across myriad sites, via a tiny bookmarklet and a single Web page.

Technorati (http://technorati.com/) and IceRocket (http://icerocket.com/) head in the opposite direction of these sites, searching for who (usually a blogger) has recently linked to a specific item or site. Technorati is perhaps the most famous blog-search tool. Among other functions, it has emphasized tagging as part of search and discovery, recommending (and rewarding) users who add tags to their blog posts. Bloggers can register their site for free with Technorati; their posts will then be searchable by content and supplemental tags.

Many of these services allow users to save their searches as RSS feeds to be returned to and examined in an RSS reader, such as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/). This subtle ability is neatly recursive in Web 2.0 terms, since it lets users create microcontent (RSS search terms) about microcontent (blog posts). Being merely text strings, such search feeds are shareable in all sorts of ways, so one can imagine collaborative research projects based on growing swarms of these feeds—social bookmarking plus social search.

Students can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public developments in science, business news, and so on.

The ability to save and share a search, and in the case of PubSub, to literally search the future, lets students and faculty follow a search over time, perhaps across a span of weeks in a semester. As the live content changes, tools like Waypath’s topic stream, BlogPulse’s trend visualizations, or DayPop’s word generator let a student analyze how a story, topic, idea, or discussion changes over time. Furthermore, the social nature of these tools means that collaboration between classes, departments, campuses, or regions is easily supported. One could imagine faculty and students across the United States following, for example, the career of an Islamic feminist or the outcome of a genomic patent and discussing the issue through these and other Web 2.0 tools. Such a collaboration could, in turn, be discovered, followed, and perhaps joined by students and faculty around the world. Extending the image, one can imagine such a social research object becoming a learning object or an alternative to courseware.

A glance at Blogdex offers a rough snapshot of what the blogosphere is tending to pay attention to.

A closer look at an individual Blogdex result reveals the blogs that link to a story. As we saw with del.icio.us, this publication of interest allows the user to follow up on commentary, to see why those links are there, and to learn about those doing the linking. Once again, this is a service that connects people through shared interest in information.

The rich search possibilities opened up by these tools can further enhance the pedagogy of current events. A political science class could explore different views of a news story through traditional media using Google News, then from the world of blogs via Memeorandum. A history class could use Blogdex in an exercise in thinking about worldviews. There are also possibilities for a campus information environment. What would a student newspaper look like, for example, with a section based on the Digg approach or the OhmyNews structure? Thematizing these tools as objects for academic scrutiny, the operation and success of such projects is worthy of study in numerous disciplines, from communication to media studies, sociology to computer science.

At the same time, many services are hosted externally to academia. They are the creations of enthusiasts or business enterprises and do not necessarily embrace the culture of higher education.

Lawrence Lessig, J. D. Lasica, and others remind us that as tools get easier to use and practices become more widespread, it also becomes easier for average citizens to commit copyright violations.19

Web 2.0’s lowered barrier to entry may influence a variety of cultural forms with powerful implications for education, from storytelling to classroom teaching to individual learning. It is much simpler to set up a del.icio.us tag for a topic one wants to pursue or to spin off a blog or blog departmental topic than it is to physically meet co-learners and experts in a classroom or even to track down a professor. Starting a wiki-level text entry is far easier than beginning an article or book.

How can higher education respond, when it offers a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering?

t's worth noting that in this particular study "social media" includes text messaging. Combined with blogging and social networking, these three technologies are used by 50% of U.S. adults for communication purposes.

85% of rely on one of the three platforms to stay in touch with others.

Although these numbers look promising for our favorite genre, social media, they should probably be taken with a grain of salt. While we do believe that text messaging is an important method of communication, it doesn't quite fit with what the standard definition of social media is: blogging, social networking sites, and other web properties that engage collective groups of people to drive their content. We would like to see how the numbers really break down among the three "social media" activities they measured, but that data was not immediately available.

Side Note: Personally, I find the terminology "the great unwashed (masses)" a little demeaning. The fact is that those at the lower end of the technology-use spectrum don't use things like text messaging and the internet as much because they are usually economically disadvantaged - an unfortunate condition that has numerous causes including everything from poor educational resources to lack of job opportunities in their geographic region. Lumping this lower-income group into one "great unwashed" group was an unnecessarily cruel way to address those not participating in the social media revolution.

1 out of 10 U.S. adults now publish blogs (up from 5% last year) 1 out of 5 18-34-year olds publish blogs (up from 10% last year) 22% of U.S. adults use IM (up from 9% last year) 21% of 18-34-year olds use IM (up from 14% last year)

I think now it's taking off because social networks are taking off...People may have been doing it before, but may not have realized it. Now they're recognizing it for what it is."

demographic

In exploratory qualitative research, we have undertaken indicates the consumer might take a broader view of what social media might mean. For example, it could be taken by consumers to mean any digital form of personal communication that helps enable peer collaboration and sharing. This softer, less-structured definition is possibly useful in determining possible future growth areas of personal social P2P media from a consumer-centric POV."

a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.

Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.

Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.

Google

Google

The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:

Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.

ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.

In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. It doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers

As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."

They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability. Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.

the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.

They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

cholarly publishers

Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.

Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.

Web 1.0,

garbed new business and publishing models in 20th-century clothes.

fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.

Flickr, YouTube

micromarkets

multiple demographics

Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.

Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"

It has its limits, but it also both confers and confirms authority because people tend to point to authoritative sources to bolster their own work.

That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.

user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance

Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be): Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any). Prestige of commenters and other participants. Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered. Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status? Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read. Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations. Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.

It's software that supports group interaction

how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table.

We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.

If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.

So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast.

So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else.

The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave.

That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups.

what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group.

there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.

The first is sex talk,

second basic pattern

The identification and vilification of external enemies.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.

third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration

The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique.

So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.

He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.

Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.

What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters.

This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.

nd the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

So the first answer to Why Now? is simply "Because it's time." I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern. We got the weblog pattern in around '96 with Drudge. We got weblog platforms starting in '98. The thing really was taking off in 2000. By last year, everyone realized: Omigod, this thing is going mainstream, and it's going to change everything.

Why was there an eight-year gap between a forms-capable browser and the Pepys diaries? I don't know. It just takes a while for people to get used to these ideas. So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution. We've internalized the ideas and people are now working with them. Second, the things that people are now building are web-native.

A weblog is web-native. It's the web all the way in. A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration. It's lightweight, it's loosely coupled, it's easy to extend, it's easy to break down. And it's not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form. It assumes http is transport. It assumes markup in the coding. RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication. So we're taking all of these tools and we're extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.

Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern.

You can say, in the conference call or the chat: "Go over to the wiki and look at this."

It's just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It's different from: Let's take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.

And finally, and this is the thing that I think is the real freakout, is ubiquity.

In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.

But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online. Everyone they're friends with is online. Everyone in their family is online.

And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted.

There's a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we're enjoying here thanks to Wifi. If you assume whenever a group of people are gathered together, that they can be both face to face and online at the same time, you can start to do different kinds of things. I now don't run a meeting without either having a chat room or a wiki up and running. Three weeks ago I ran a meeting for the Library of Congress. We had a wiki, set up by Socialtext, to capture a large and very dense amount of technical information on long-term digital preservation.

The people who organized the meeting had never used a wiki before, and now the Library of Congress is talking as if they always had a wiki for their meetings, and are assuming it's going to be at the next meeting as well -- the wiki went from novel to normal in a couple of days.

It really quickly becomes an assumption that a group can do things like "Oh, I took my PowerPoint slides, I showed them, and then I dumped them into the wiki. So now you can get at them." It becomes a sort of shared repository for group memory. This is new. These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who's in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.

"What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends."

The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There's a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category. So it's not like a cake recipe. There's nothing you can do to make it come out right every time.

Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.

So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront.

Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."

But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.

The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations

And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the tyranny of the majority. So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts.

All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal. A

If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.

Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity.

Three, you need barriers to participation.

It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.

The user of social software is the group, not the individual.