The announcement of a "WikiChix" list for female only discussion has prompted a huge thread on WikiEN-l. As previously seen in discussion about an administrator only IRC channel or email list, proposals for separate spaces are particular troubling to communities with liberal egalitarian ideals. Formally excluding anyone from the larger community prompts questions of: is this fair?, is this discriminatory?, shouldn't we ensure the common space is accessible rather than spinning off groups? Of course, the free speech ideals of the community would not permit the restriction of speech in the common space in any case and there will always those that would want to test any boundaries. (I'm fond of the norm of Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point for this reason.) In my response to the thread I wrote:

... In my informal observation of similar communities, I haven't perceived a decrease in female presence after the provisioning of a female space. A counter hypothesis is that: women who have a more supportive space to fall back upon will become more comfortable in speaking in the common spaces.

In any case, the presumption of equality and the objection to separate spaces -- as this thread evidences -- is quite interesting, and happens again, and again, and again! :) Wilson (2003) notes such discussions orbit a *presumption* of equality.

In order to defend their views of a just world and equality, three strategies have been adopted by the participants in the study:

1. The situation is changing (and men seem to believe this)

2. Men and women are seen as equal but different -- women do not enjoy competing as much. This would be supported by the data from both the questionnaires and interviews where women were using computers less, have less confidence in their abilities, and are more attracted to the arts.

3. There is a misperception that computing and technology is for males.

(Wilson 2003:138)

The interesting consequence is that even if there is gender bias no action on the part of females is taken because (1) those females who believe there are equal opportunities will see no reason for action; (2) those who believe there is a misperception or that women feel less confident will be tolerant of encouragement for women, but they are also content see the status quo maintained; and (3) the women who believe in their equal abilities do not want to be singled out for special treatment and may therefore "count themselves out and express ambivalence" (p. 138).

In the end, the WikiChix list was moved from being hosted by Wikimedia, which might carry the presumption of endorsing exclusive discrimination, to a non-Wikipedia host.

I'm sharing this note from the beginning of my dissertation so others working with online resources might comment.

The type and number of bibliographic sources of this work merit a couple comments.

First, most of the primary sources are online, and have only been online. Quotations from e-mail and most exclusively online resources have no page numbers associated with them.

Second, many of the printed sources (primary and secondary) are now online. This is common in recent works where authors place versions of a print publication online, or where older works are now in the public domain and have been republished online. In such cases I use the publication date of the version I used. If necessary, I include the original publication date in prose adjacent to the reference, and I include it in the title of the work in the bibliography. For example the bibliographic entry for Project Gutenberg's 2004 republication of H. G. Wells' "A Modern Utopia" would be:

Wells, H. (2004). A modern utopia (1905). (6424). Retrieved on September 20, 2006 from < http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/mdntp10h.htm >.

The page numbers associated with print-only sources obviously correspond to the printed page. For those sources that are also online, the page number might be associated with the pagination of the printed online resource from which I first took my notes, or the printed material, for which I later found an online copy. I believe it will be clear to the reader which is the case.

Third, for some recent sources, there are many publications by the same author in the same year. After a couple of years of experimentation with the software I use to manage this material I have settled upon the convention of identifying such a source by appending a token to the publication year that is composed of the first three substantive words of the title. So, instead of using the letters [a-z], which some bibliographic systems use, my reference for Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" article is: (Wikipedia 2006npv). This provides stability across additions/subtractions to the bibliography and across chapters, and is comprehensible to the author and hopefully the reader.

Finally, Web sources do change, particularly Wiki pages! Wherever possible I include the date of the version of the resource to which I am referring. Wikimedia resources are also identified by their versioned, "stable" or "permanent," URL. It is possible that I will reference different versions of the same Wiki page.

All of this may sound confusing, and it was no easy task coming to this understanding, but in the end I hope it is useful. If the intention of bibliography is to permit the reader to follow the author's journey through the sources, the ready accessibility of online resources is a boon to all.

When I've spoken about the advantages of Wikis in the past, I pointed out the benefit of having organizational/cultural knowledge documentation be very "close" with actual practice. Programmers are familiar with this issue in the form of their code being synchronized (or more likely not) with its documentation. An advantage of having high level languages like Python is that code and documentation almost merge. The Web (Wikis) can do the same for an organization. The W3C was a good place to work for this very reason, and every other place I've been has frustrated me for this reason: to do anything one must wade through contradictory and outdated documentation and forms and speak to a handful of people before getting something close to authoritative. And then I lament to myself, if this was only on a Wiki!

This week I've been reading up on Communities of Practice (Wenger 1998cpl) again and find that the concept "duality of meaning" reflects my concern. In Wenger's terms, sometimes practice and reification of that practice into artifacts are at odds. I think Wikis have the ability to draw a closer convergence between the two:

Participation and reification are a duality, not opposites: they interact, they do not define a spectrum; they imply each other rather than substitute for each other; they transform the relationship rather than translating each other; they describe an interplay rather than classifications. (Wenger 1998cpl:66-68)

When I make a substantive contribution to Wikipedia, I tend to edit "off-line" until I'm satisfied with the text, and then post it in a single chunk. While I am only a WikiGnome in any case, the typical Wikipedia metric of "edit counts" would underestimate the contribution made by people who edit in a similar fashion. My own simple Python script exhibits this problem. To get some sense of the substance of any given edit, one would have to go beyond screen-scraping and perform analysis on the Wikipedia database -- something beyond my desktop computer. Fortunately, Aaron Swartz purchased "some time on a computer cluster" and came up with the following novel result:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

I'm looking forward to seeing these findings replicated.

In 1999, while I was a fellow at the Berkman Center, I wrote a paper on Why the Internet is Good; in it, I noted 10 factors in Internet community policy formation (e.g., IETF) that contribute to their success. When I consider other open content communities I still find this framework to be useful, even in the case of the Wikipedia.

• Open Participation: IETF (mostly), WP (more so).

  No one is really excluded from the IETF, but you do have to pay the meeting attendance fee and have the interest in this sort of technical subject. Nearly any literate person might have an interest in the Wikipedia.

• No Kings, but Elders?: IETF (mostly), WP (slightly less so).

  Both the IETF and the Wikipedia have meritocratic governance structures, which I now call paramount leadership. I think the main difference here is that many Wikipedians can live very happily without ever encountering questions of governance; they can work on their own particular interests and make substantive contributions as they are. At the IETF, everyone is striving for a single standard.

• Consensus and Competitive Scaling: IETF (partly), WP (partly).

  In my 1999 essay I speak about the difficulties of consensus scaling but note it can work when combined with many of the later factors: "This is because of competitive scaling: a small group of people get to produce their best work under consensus, and then compete, coordinate, cooperate, and learn with other groups." In the standards arena it is possible for small groups of people to work on informally competing specifications, and let the best one win. (I talk further about this in design by committee and the possibilities of red/blue team design.)

• Implementation and Enforcement: IETF (mostly), WP (not really).

  At the Wikipedia it can be difficult to dispassionately test whether a given policy is unambiguously better than another policy. In the technical domain one has the capability to implement alternatives and see whether they work.

• Limitation of Scope: IETF (yes), WP (yes).

  Just as "a Working Group to be extremely rigorous in defining and enforcing the scope of its activity" the Wikipedia community has been strict in specifying what their mission is, an Encyclopedia, and what it is not.

• Funded Mandates and Lack of Fiat: IETF (mostly), WP (mostly).

  "The implementation and operational use of a technical policy demonstrate an interest and ability to deploy the policy at large."

• Uniform Enforcement: IETF (mostly), WP (mostly).

• Descriptive Policy: IETF (mostly), WP (mostly).

• Policy Deprecation: IETF (partly), WP (not much).

  "It is useful for a policy that is no longer in operation to be stricken from the books; it simplifies the understanding one must have about one's regulatory environment." This is basically Shirky's observation about the formation of policy.

• Metrics: IETF (mostly), WP (less so).

  This is tied to the implementation issue, but in the technical domain it can be very nice to know that a particular algorithm works 20% faster than the old way of doing things. The realm of natural language and human meaning is less amenable to these types of metrics.

Doug Morris, recommended Shapin's (1994) A Social History of Truth which I found very interesting in light of my interest with politeness. Shapin makes an ethno-historical argument that "knowledge is a collective good" of moralistic interdependence. Earlier, the free action and virtue of a gentleman garnered trust as there were no external pressures which could cause him to "shift" his views. (Though critics might argue that the gentleman's privileged status certainly biased his perspective.) In modernity, it is now the institutions which have moral authority to make truth claims. Interestingly, in the Wikipedia community, where I argue notions of good faith and civility are key, they do not rely upon the premodern performance of civility to represent social standing and consequently the ability to legitimate knowledge. Rather, truth emerges from civil discourse between people who may be strangers. Furthermore, Wikipedia is controversial from the modern perspective because it does not rely upon the "system trust" of institutions. Instead, it is civility itself that now generates truth, rather than being a proxy for social standing or institutional affiliation. (My argument is a little too strong, because Wikipedia does derive legitimacy for its claims from its sources, which are part of the modern institutional system trust.)

It is interesting to see how the social organization and culture of Wikipedia changes as it matures. During a session at Wikimania on liability (i.e., Section 230) I raised my point of how legal concerns have apparently required the adoption of a "hidden" edit feature and the hiring of a general counsel. Later I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Patrick and explain that I was not necessarily objecting to these changes -- I expect they are prudent steps to take in a litigious world -- only pointing them out as important. I also came away feeling that Brad was very much in the Wikipedia spirit of pragmatic idealism: working towards a vision of a free encyclopedia, but also being realistic and careful.

During the Foundation Panel, evidence of another change was present. When longtime board member Angela Beesley was asked why she resigned she alluded to a change in decision-making practices: conversations have been abandoned for voting on a Wiki. Decision-making by the Board has always been an interesting issue given possible tensions between elected "community members" and the other appointments. In fact, Jimbo Wales had stated that he would never vote against the community members (Angela and Anthere) on community questions. Yet, it is not exactly clear to me why the shift happened when it did, and why.

The Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy was much discussed at this month's Wikimania 2006. There was, of course, my own presentation asking "Is Wikipedia neutral?," but I am not alone in appreciating the importance and value of this notion. However, two other discussion during the conference made me think that perhaps neutrality is sometimes overvalued.

The first issue was whether neutrality should be a policy on all Wikis? Many think not, and my own response was that Ward Cunningham's Wiki -- the first -- was not neutral: it advocated for a particular type of software development practice. Such "perspective making" (Boland and Tenkasi 1995) within a community is an important function.

The second issue is whether there is something we can learn from neutrality without having to actually be neutral? Indeed, there is: civility. During the conference I remarked to a colleague that neutrality and civility are often conflated because neutrality roughly necessitates civility. But that does not mean that absent the neutrality requirement, we must be rude. Kingwell (1995:247) makes an interesting argument that in a pluralistic society it is too much to ask that we have "genuine respect" for everyone. Civility only asks that we (initially) treat others as if they were worthy of respect and understanding. This notion, in the Wikipedia lexicon, is that of "good faith" an often connected but distinct and separable notion from the neutral point of view.

Larry Sanger, Wikipedia cofounder and present-day apostate, has a new project. In his recent article Text and Collaboration Sanger (2006tcp) makes an argument for why "strong collaboration" works in open content communities and introduces the Text Outline Project. This project, part of the Digital Universe, is intended to summarize the canon of scholarly public domain works into a "single massive outline" or "The Book of the World." The very name reminds me of HG Wells' (1938) visionary project "The World Brain." (As I discuss in Wikipedia's Heritage: Vision, Pragmatics, and Happenstance, The World Brain never materialized but Wells made a fortune off the partially plagiarized The Outline of History.)

Wells wrote The World Brain would "solve the problem of that jigsaw puzzle and bring all that scattered and ineffective wealth [of information] into something like a common understanding." Sanger writes The Book of the World will "have revolutionary implications by making knowledge more easily accessible and smashing interdisciplinary and language barriers." The microphotography upon which The World Brain would be based would permitthe student "to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in exact replica." The Book of the World will permit a student to "instantly find where a specific passage is located in the outline, and then consult other texts from a wide assortment of thinkers on that precise point.... the student is saved trips to the library stacks."

While I do not think The Book of the World would be of as much general interest as the Wikipedia, I think it would be of use to scholars -- young and old alike. One can find many abstracts and outlines on the Web, but each is in the author's own idiosyncratic style. As far as I know I'm the only person I know who is placed all of my summary/outlines (~2000) on the Web in a standard MindMap and HTML form. Only one other person that I know of is using this system and we are not working on the same mindmaps -- just using the same tools. I thought about ways to collaborate but haven't been able to follow through yet. First, I haven't found other collaborators. Second, besides Wikis, collaborative text editing tools are not easy to come by and use. And finally, there are, sadly, always, copyright concerns. Most of my reading is not from the public domain. Therefore my outlines (with extensive excerpts) would have a questionable status beyond my own scholarly use. At last week's New York Wikipedia MeetUp Postdlf and I were discussing the copyright of summaries though each of us were ignorant of the standing of things like Cliff Notes. If you have any pointers on the legality of this genre, please let me know!

What does the recent news of a Wikipedia CEO who is also a lawyer, an "oversight" function that makes hidden revisions to Wikipedia, and the threat of the Debian Project severing its relationship with its legally chartered non-profit have in common? A strong indication that open communities with a formal legal standing are a conflicted beast.

The sociologist Max Weber made an important observation of how leadership often shifts from a charismatic leader to a more bureaucratic form of governance as a community matures; Wikipedia is no exception. An interesting question in the Wikipedia case is to what extent can the shift occur while decision making remains in the open, within sight and control of the larger community? The delegation of power from Jimbo Wales to the Mediation and Arbitration Committees is an example of what Weber called "routinization." (You can read more about the governing and leadership structure of Wikipedia in Do as I do: leadership in the Wikipedia.) Both of these committees are open. However, in matters of law, maintaining openness is a difficult task. As Wikipedia has grown in size and repute the likelihood of the Wikipedia being subject to legal action has similarly grown. The tension between openness and closeness in such a community (a topic of study of my colleague Shay David) is no better demonstrated than by the WP:Office action.

On the Wikipedia one is expected to discuss the editing of an article with fellow contributors. Arguments are made in the open with reference to public policies. However, for those with a proprietary interest, this process of reasoned discussion can be circumvented via a call or letter to the "Wikipedia office." And, sometimes, rightfully so. What obligation did Seigenthaler, someone completely unfamiliar with Wikis, have to edit the Wikipedia in order to remove the libelous claim that he was implicated in the assassination of a Kennedy? None. As Jimmy Wales wrote, "The problem we are seeing, again and again, is this attitude that some poor victim of a biased rant in Wikipedia ought to not get pissed and take us up on our offer of 'anyone can edit' but should rather immerse themselves in our arcane internal culture until they understand the right way to get things done."

However, unfortunately, the office mechanism can be abused by those pushing a non-encyclopedic POV (point of view), such as promoting (or censoring negative views of) a commercial product. If such people can't win their arguments on the merits of notability and neutrality, having their lawyer call the office might prompt an office intervention -- such as blanking or deleting the contentious article which should then be labeled with the WP:Office tag.

Something like WP:Office is an unfortunate though (probably) necessary mechanism whereby reasoned discussion is excepted so as to avoid legal problems. Yet, in an amusing and sad irony WP:Office soon became a red flag to those who dislike this intervention or otherwise like to make trouble for Wikipedia (e.g., copying sensitive or contentious materials off Wikipedia to continue to cause trouble). Whereas office actions were intended to quickly and quietly remove a potential liability, they became a flash-point. This led to the genuinely sad case in which office actions were taken without being labeled as such and a "good-faith" administrator was desysopped and blocked indefinitely because he had reverted the hidden landmine of an unlabeled office action. (Fortunately, his response was an exemplar of Wikipedia tact and his position was soon restored.)

This week the realities of this tension between open collaboration and legal action are indicated by two announcements: the appointment to a CEO position who will also act as general counsel, and the deployment of a "oversight" (revision hiding) feature which permits edits to be hidden from an article's history page. Legal threats are clearly a top priority.

Edgar Schein argues that organizations are shaped by the crises they face in interaction with the external environment and how those events are internally integrated within the organization. This integration is not always smooth or successful, particularly for an open community. Another example of this has been the recent dispute in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution project (a community my colleague Biella Coleman has been studying). In a thread entitled Who can make binding legal agreements, the Debian community came into conflict with the SPI Board, it's own legally chartered "umbrella"! Can SPI preempt Debian decision making processes? Can Debian decisions foist liability upon SPI it is unwilling to accept? These are difficult decisions when we lack a legally robust and safe means of the open collaboration that Wikipedia and Debian represent. This has lead Larry Sanger to argue that Collaborative Free Works Should Be Protected by the Law. A proposal that deserves serious consideration.

I recently completed my review and analysis of the Nupedia e-mail list archives. Since they are no longer easily accessible, I thought I would share the raw archives: nupedia-l.tar.bz2. This HTML version of the e-mail archives was extracted from the Internet Archive via the following command:

wget --exclude-domains gizmology.net -e robots=off -nH --cut-dirs=3 --base=http://web.archive.org/web/20030822044803/http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/ -r -l 4 -N -k -p -R js -Gbase http://web.archive.org/web/20030822044803/http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/

I believe this archive contains additional textual processing subsequent to the `wget` to make it more useful to me.

If you wish to access the messages from this archive, turn off your JavaScript. Otherwise, you will be taken to the online version when you click on a link, which can be slow. However, accessing the online Web version can be useful if I failed to gather a copy from "20030822044803" date space of the archive and you want to try other periods. (One can also find an mbox-like file of the messages though it would require a lot of work to make it compliant to the mbox format.) This is a tar archive compressed with bzip. If you are inclined to cite this collection you can note it is part of the "Reagle Wikipedia Archive."

A Zen-inspired aesthetic of haiku is sabi: an insightful appreciation of the "suchness" of ordinary objects and daily events. Hass (1994:xiv) writes of this as a "quality of actuality, of the moment seized on and rendered purely." This pureness of vision led Barthes (1983:60) to claim that haiku's "brevity would guarantee their perfection," their "simplicity would attest to their profundity."

I am foolish enough to aspire towards this quality in my own work. Of course, in my dissertation proposal I cloak my poetic inspiration with sympathetic methodological scholarship:

Yet, there is a goal that I aspire to, my research "should be empirical enough to be credible and analytical enough to be interesting" (van Maanen1988:29). I hope to make a convincing contribution (Golden-Biddle and Locke 1993) by providing an account that has authenticity, "the ability of the text to convey the vitality of everyday life encountered by the researcher in the field setting" (p. 599), plausibility, "the ability of the text to connect two worlds [of the writer and reader] that are put in play in the reading of the written account" (p. 600), and criticality, "the ability of the text to actively probe readers to reconsider there taken-for-granted ideas and beliefs" (p. 600).

I recognize this aspiration is foolish because it is not the norm, as I understand academia. I have long characterized my own stance as a "reflective practitioner," a seemingly rare and unsupported breed. I do not claim a perfectly impartial objective and outsider perspective; I reach for analytical, reflective, distance while appreciating that those most familiar with a phenomenon also understand its faults the best, however much they are attached to it. This posture opens me up to criticisms of losing impartiality, for having "gone native." (But, of course, I was already partially native and "critical" should not always mean pejorative.) Or, some will ask "what is the contribution to theory?" This question is important but incomplete to my mind, its companion should be: "and what is the contribution to practice?" For what is the point of a field that follows the world so as to only argue about how we should argue about it? In his study of Quaker decision-making Sheeran (1996:xiv) wrote in his preface :

Social scientists and political philosophers are invited to discover in Quakers what may be the only modern Western community in which decision-making achieved the group-centered decisions of traditional societies. In the Conclusion, the author discusses Friends as a possible answer to the common contemporary wish for enhancement beyond the fragmented individuation of "liberal" man.

Finally, the author hopes Quakers themselves will find in these pages a helpful mirroring of Friends decision-making. Newcomers to Quakerism and those who find themselves in roles of leadership within the community may find in this study an outsider's understanding of the possibilities and pitfalls of the Quaker method of going beyond majority rule.

This strikes me as an worthwhile balance, one I hope to achieve is well.

Now that my proposal is done, I'm looking forward to the actual dissertation. (I really enjoyed writing my Master's thesis.) However, that doesn't mean I look upon the project without concern. One concern is with the form of the dissertation (as a genre) and interdisciplinary work. In the proposal, beyond the actual research questions and methods, the text was not as focused as it might've been as I was not reporting findings, proposing a theory, telling a story, or making an argument -- beyond that the concepts covered were important to me. (I was thinking that I have conveyed my findings, written stories, and made arguments in existing work and will do so more completely in the dissertation.) Fortunately, the proposal is done, but I want to make sure the dissertation doesn't feel the same way. This raises a number of questions from the secondary literature.

First, I have not yet chosen a "discipline." Beyond a focus on collaboration and technology I feel I could be writing to new media, organizational studies, communication, or STS scholars. I'm happy to pull from a diverse set of disciplines -- look at my committee -- but it can also create some challenges.

Second, my two inspirations don't make much use of secondary literature. Sheeran simply dropped the theoretical argument he made in his dissertation from his book -- with no loss in my humble opinion. Morton was writing a history and employed primary sources in order to tell his story and make his argument. I will be doing much the same, but I want to be informed and employ (diverse) social science and theory where appropriate. Popular press social science books do this sort of thing (e.g., Jared Diamond, Robert Wright, Malcolm Gladwell etc.) but these are not historical works either.

So, I am not confident in the style in which I will be writing. I haven't yet been struck with a great example in this disciplinary style/literature; Siva's work is close and perhaps my issue is related to those he raises in his recent piece on "Critical Information Studies." (Though my concern with "critical" studies is present even there: I believe it is important to go beyond pejorative critique and recognize -- and even contribute to -- things we might find to be good. Though, of course, we need to be open to the phenomenon, and as scholars, like to find surprises and novelty.)

As a student this time around -- more so than my experiences in computer science and policy -- I find that the process of getting feedback includes a deluge of references. In my present interdisciplinary domain of humanities and social science it seems there are many traditions making a claim upon a subject via their own literatures. Consequently, feedback in the form of "you should read X" can be overwhelming. One skill of a scholar is to learn to be open to such feedback while separating the wheat from the chaff. This is not to say that some recommendations are not welcome, but some are better suited to the purpose at hand than others.

Consequently, when I give feedback to colleagues I try to avoid the imperious "you should read X" or the possibly insulting "have you read X?" and try to cast my comment as "I think the notion of Y in X will help you with your subject in the following way..."

A colleague of mine inspired this maxim in her own guidelines for a reading group this past semester and the more I collaborate with others, the more I like it.

My dissertation proposal: In good faith: the collaborative culture of Wikipedia has been accepted and I'm now officially ABD (all but dissertation)! The proposal and all the other drafts I've written are now available on a single page.

A while ago I noted that Wikipedia was including "permalinks" to their articles: a way to refer to the specific version one was reading. The citations standards for Wikipedia had also been updated and recommended that people use these versioned links as well as specific date and time stamps (UTC) to refer to articles. Last week I implemented this for my own references and went through and updated the 80 or so Wikipedia pages in my Mindmap to make sure that any excerpted text was from a specific and dated page. At first, I thought this level of specificity wouldn't be required, but in fact, I did encounter a couple of cases where text I had cited was no longer present in the most recent version.

As an aside, a neat feature of my reference system is that it is quite easy to query for titles that have been read in a certain period. For example, to see everything I read last month, I just need to query r=200503". Creating a RSS feed of what I'm reading would be an easy next step!

During a conference on Friday, panelists from popular social network sites were asked to speculate about the future. Scott Heiferman, co-founder of Meetup, presented a vision of technological advance and social progress along familiar lines: technology, information, democracy, etc. For example, we might not have to worry about privacy and the partitions between the various roles we play in life (e.g., a friend to some and a boss or professor to others) because society will necessarily become more accepting and tolerant of the full range of our life's facets.

I responded, from the audience, along familiar lines as well: this is a rose-tinted vision that fails to account for the facility Al Qaeda has with technology, the ease with which neo-Nazi spread the information, or that weak democracies (without a strong civic right and culture) can become fascist.

Such an argument is not new and entails questions of technological essentialism (i.e., is it necessarily progressive?) and determinism (i.e., is that progress inevitable?).

The critical party to this argument, which is often ignored, is culture. Consider the Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not good and interesting because of technology, it is those things because of its culture (e.g., neutrality, friendliness, etc.). Because technology has played a necessary, but insufficient, role in many seemingly progressive phenomena we attribute far more to technology than it merits. (Gutenberg made his living printing the church's indulgences long before Luther's objections to them.)

But, what, then, can we say of information technology if it isn't inherently progressive and emancipatory? "Inherent" is certainly too strong a word. I agree that it has been a benefit to humanity in many ways. And I will admit that my own early disappointed cipherpunk visions -- and even RSI -- have contributed to a skepticism of utopian claims. But I also believe that technology is really the wrong "unit of analysis."

When I wrote Why the Internet Is Good seven years ago I didn't address technology directly. Instead, I spoke of the ways in which the early culture of Internet standards-making was commendable: open participation; no kings, but elders; consensus and competitive scaling, transparent implementation and enforcement. And this hints at why I think an essentialist notion of progressive technology fails.

Why, then, does Internet technology seem progressive? Because the people who built it were geeks. And the geeks love the interesting. How do you make things interesting? You enable experimentation and communication. And this also has wider, progressive effects. But it is not inherent to technology -- perhaps we could speak simply of sympathies at best with geeky technology.

My argument is much like the one Larry Lessig made to me many years ago, but then he was speaking of law and how the progressive "West Coast" law of "code" need not necessarily remain so, and how it might be trumped by the "East Coast" law of politicians. Yet, I'm not concerned with law specifically, but of culture and when I look at new online communities I ask questions about their culture. Yes, the latest technology is cool, but how do people treat each other? Do they have values of tolerance and civility? Are there norms of humility and friendliness? This is why I've been skeptical of technologies that simply exaggerate the social cliques of high school hallways; this is why I find it difficult to get excited about the first "Web-rings" to present-day hundred-fold friend lists and blog rolls. However, one of the reasons I do love the Wikipedia is because they ask of even the most senior participants, "Please do not bite the newcomers."

When I go back and read Rheingold, writing at the outset of the virtual community phenomenon, the folks on the Well weren't really speaking about technology. They spoke of moments of joy and sorrow shared within a community's culture that could hold and make meaning of those experiences. Technology contributed to that, but such an outcome is not essential to technology, nor a necessary result.

Exams are done, course work is done, the task now is to get my dissertation proposal completed and defended. Last semester I took on two more (draft) pieces of the dissertation puzzle, a recent history and the question of leadership:

• Wikipedia's Heritage: Vision, Pragmatics, and Happenstance - moving on from my earlier consideration of print publishers in Four Short Stories about the Reference Work, I consider recent digital encycopedic works:

  This essay explores development of globally available digital reference works from their first imaginings to contemporary cases. My hope in undertaking such a project is to identify technical and social aspects of digital reference work production that can contribute to an understanding of a prominent contemporary exemplar, the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. Why did it take over 50 years for the vision of "[w]holly new forms of encyclopedias" (Bush 1945: §8) to be realized? The answer, presented in this essay, was that it required an alignment of a coherent goal, technical practicality, and serendipity: vision, pragmatics, and happenstance. ...

• Do as I do: leadership in the Wikipedia

  In this paper I consider how notions of leadership operate in collaborative on-line cultures. In particular, I consider the seemingly paradoxical, or perhaps merely playful, juxtaposition of informal tyrant-like titles (e.g., "Benevolent Dictator") in otherwise seemingly egalitarian voluntary content production communities such as the Wikipedia. To accomplish this, I first introduce the Wikipedia as an open content community and review existing literature on the role of leadership in such communities. I then relate ethnographic and archival data on how leadership is understood, performed, and discussed in the Wikipedia community. I conclude by integrating concepts from existing literature and my own findings into a theory of leadership and note other communities and leaders against which this theory could be tested. ...

FirstMonday's special issue on Internet banking, e-money and the Internet gift economy includes a "reprint" of my paper Trust in Electronic Markets, published almost 10 years ago. I took the opportunity in the special issue to reflect on what has changed over the past decade:

This paper was certainly a creature of its time. A decade ago the Internet bubble was receiving its first puffs of exaggerated exuberance. For me, this time was also informed by Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and more importantly, May's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. The Internet and the anonymous cryptographic markets that would evolve upon it were immensely exciting. Or, at least their potential was exciting; the vision has yet to be.

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