Community Introduction

Joseph Reagle

Community

“Membership is the feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness.”
“influence, a sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group.”
“reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs … the feeling that members’ needs will be met by … their membership in the group.”
“shared emotional connection, the commitment and belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences.” (McMillan & Chavis 1986, p. 9)

It’s “The Most Important Laboratory for Social Scientific and Computing Research in History”.
We can learn about it together as a class, with help of WikiEdu.
It will exercise your scholarly and writing skills (i.e., a “capstone”).
You can make a substantive contribution to something that could last centuries.