They work, they go to the pub and while they share cooking duties they’re not against ordering a takeaway on a Friday night. ‘I would argue that quite often intentional communities reflect the period in which they were formed,’ explains Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University and lead for the Intentional Communities Research Group.

Renewable Energy Communities as Modes of Collective Prosumership: A Multi-Disciplinary Assessment

"Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.

For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the oldart-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out ofnowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. Ibecame (and still am) more and more convinced that the importantchanges in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. Icall this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. This word isnow starting to gain some currency - the philosopher James Ogilvy uses itin his most recent book.

One interesting observation about these markets is that the upper-limit for value creation of individual ventures here, one creator, one community, etc, is smaller than startups. There are only a handful of trillion-dollar communities in the history of humanity, and no trillion-dollar influencers or entertainers. Scale will come more from breadth, not just making one good bet, as is the case in startups.

The next Y Combinator will identify an industry where most people are under-valuing a certain class of talent in an industry poised to grow rapidly, gather a community to commoditize tribal knowledge, and over time scale it into a self-sustaining flywheel that helps them grow their gravitational field. As for which industry, my guess is as good as anyone else’s – unpredictability is a core element of disruption, almost definitionally – but I think there’s a good chance it’ll come from one of these areas: The creator economy – people who can independently grow an audience and monetize them sustainably. Entertainment, as an old, bureaucratic industry adjacent to this space, is also an interesting target. Communities – I’ve written extensively about my bullishness on communities elsewhere. Higher education – what replaces Harvard and Stanford?

He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

User participation in any online internet community generally follows the 90-9-1 rule:90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don’t contribute9% of community members edit or respond to content but don’t create content of their own1% of community members create new content

a society-wide hyperconversation. This hyperconversation operationalizes continuous discourse, including its differentiation and emergent framing aspects. It aims to assist people in developing their own ways of framing and conceiving the problem that makes sense given their social, cultural, and environmental contexts. As depicted in table 1, the hyperconversation also reflects a slower, more deliberate approach to discourse; this acknowledges damaged democratic processes and fractured societal social cohesion. Its optimal design would require input from other relevant disciplines and expertise,

Measuring the health of an online community by librarian:libertarian ratio

Learning happens when a connection is made between these nodes;

PLE is the educational manifestation of the web’s “small pieces loosely joined,” a “world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance, and time.”

PLNs (professional learning networks) and their role in supporting the development of  ‘connected educators’.

We’re building a knowledge base, so if one writer collects information for an article, their research is made available to the other writers in the collective. 

Companies should not assume they can release a product without thinking about its unintended uses and then undo the harm that results. This often doesn’t work.Some technology

I think this new identity should… build upon a diverse group of people and ideas remember, but not revere, past research and tradition welcome independent contributors, and view itself as a collective of people, not an industry of companies work in the open, and value building and testing ideas over spreading them.

Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries,

Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

I want a [[community]], not an [[audience]]. Audience is stuff like reach, personality/celebrity, spectacle, anxiety, alienation, competition. Community is more like voice, discussion, comradery.

address historical and ongoing injustice and imagine new ways of teaching, researching, and engaging with community

Smart leaders will not focus so much on exhorting people not to be afraid of change and will instead work to do everything they can to increase a sense of stable, supportive community. Unfortunately, many leaders see stability, community, and a sense of belonging as enemies of innovation — when in reality they are the prerequisites.

an ongoing, complex process of aligning resources, practices, and initiatives of multiple communities [20].

For someone who wants to extend the platform, particularly developers, my best advice would be to ignore the hype. For now things can still be built without all the fancy tools. The difference is that I think it is safe to say few getting into WordPress development will have the next big plugin or theme. What is more likely is that new developers in WordPress will have rewarding careers working for hosts and other larger, established companies in the space.

In 1996, technology historian Jennifer S. Light compared the talk of “cyberoptimists” about virtual communities to city planners’ earlier optimistic predictions about shopping malls. As the automobile colonized U.S. cities in the 1950s, planners promised that malls would be enclosed public spaces to replace Main Streets. But as Light pointed out, the transition to suburban malls brought new inequities of access and limited the space’s functions to those that served commercial interests.

Platforms of the Facebook walled-factory type are unsuited to thework of building community, whether globally or locally, becausesuch platforms are unresponsive to their users, and unresponsive bydesign (design that is driven by a desire to be universal in scope). Itis virtually impossible to contact anyone at Google, Facebook,Twitter, or Instagram, and that is so that those platforms can trainus to do what they want us to do, rather than be accountable to ourdesires and needs

“Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”

According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.”

IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”

A corporation is not a community. It does not serve a community.

Americans worked together: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.”

Famously, he found many of the answers in state, local, and even neighborhood institutions. He wrote approvingly of American federalism, which “permits the Union to enjoy the power of a great republic and the security of a small one.” He liked the traditions of local democracy too, the “township institutions” that “give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” Despite the vast empty spaces of their country, Americans met one another, made decisions together, carried out projects together. Americans were good at democracy because they practiced democracy. They formed what he called “associations,” the myriad organizations that we now call “civil society,” and they did so everywhere:Not only do [Americans] have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools … Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS).

It turns out it’s really difficult to get people to rebel against something if they can’t see it, don’t feel empowered to make choices about, and don’t really understand it.

One of the biggest challenges is a very human one – how do we get everyone to work with their camera switched on.

the community is both endlessly creative and genuinely interested in solving big issues in meaningful ways. Whether it's their commitment to careful (and caring) community stewardship or their particular strain of techno-ethics, I have been consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at what I've seen during the last twelve months. I don't always see eye-to-eye with their decisions and I don't think that the community is perfect, but it's consistently (and deliberately) striving to be better, and that's a fairly rare thing, online or off.

Because annotating a syllabus conveys a message–from day one–that course documents are not static artifacts, that something authored by an instructor is not unwelcoming of feedback, and that student voice is both appreciated and necessary for a shared endeavor.

Annotate Your Syllabus 3.0

These days I find myself away from broadcast tools and more in the insular channels of my friend groups. What I want from technology is to share life with my friends; to be given the opportunity, and the power, to share that life, and all it includes… showing them care, or sharing the bits of knowledge that seem important to us as a group.

Identity is always about groups, and group formation is always about identity formation, and both are processes of learning.

I take my own definition of the word “community” from educational theorists Etienne and Beverly Wenger: “communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” I like this definition because it is so broad while capturing a really specific truth about groups.

Because the mainstream social networks have been designed by a tiny number of people, we have been prevented from experimenting and creating new knowledge about what sustainable community management online looks like. Start erasing the line between operators, customers, and community members and squint; you begin make out the shape of a group of people who can build for themselves and determine their own path of development.

What does “community” mean? Facebook calls its billions of users a community, and multinational brands use this word to refer to their customers. Are these communities in any meaningful sense? What about the “brand communities” I mentioned earlier, do these qualify? And can a community that is paid truly be called a community at all? As paid communities become more prominent, I expect to see these questions asked more frequently and urgently. Marketers, venture capitalists, and business writers will answer from one perspective, offering up ways to monetize large swaths of people. Journalists and critics will reply with a different perspective, decrying organizations for extracting value from relationships. And I imagine we will hear the voice of communities themselves, defending just who they are from both sides.

Education and practitioner networks We’re seeing a lot of new venture funded education communities, but here once more is a reason to be more excited about bottom-up community-driven businesses. What happens when groups of independent teachers or consultants who are already chatting have shared interfaces to formalize, quote, and invoice? In the past, guilds have provided excellent education opportunities, and they can again.

Among other social apps, Bloomberg Terminal features a Bloomberg Hacker News clone, a Bloomberg Craigslist clone, Bloomberg instant messaging, and Bloomberg-restricted email. From this perspective it is possible to view Bloomberg as a company that offers a full-stack set of social environments, news, and tooling for a distinct community with specific needs: financial workers. While Bloomberg shows what is possible when the community in question already works with large amounts of capital, its lessons are applicable to niche content providers. .. Bloomberg is an example of the classic Web 2.0 business maxim “come for the tool, stay for the network.”

Bespoke Social Media

These new paid communities largely live on invite-only Telegrams, Slacks, Discords, and Facebook groups, raising the question: could there be applications more suitable to these networks? Indeed, the growing popularity of paid communities has been noticed by a bunch of new venture-funded companies such as such as Genevachat, Mighty Networks, and Circle, all of which want to become “the platform for communities.”

Finally, commerce and social are coming together, although to much less a degree than marketing teams who talk up “brand communities” would like you to think. In all but a few cases, “community” here is just the marketing language used to describe a microbrand’s niche Instagram fandom.

A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.

As high quality content and effective brand strategy move down the long tail, “community” has become an important concept for every post-Web 2.0 player. Crypto token holders, influencer fanbases, DTC brand customers, creator audiences, and new social networks are all often referred to as communities, and each has a stake in developing community for itself.

Whoever controls the third place controls the community. If the third place is a building, and they decide to renovate, tough luck. It's being renovated. The third place is where the community lives, it's where they go by default essentially. If you own that place, you own a considerable amount of power in the community.

TINA: I hope you've read her book, The Art of Gathering. That book will change your life. You will never look at any gathering, be it family or business, the same way again. Priya talks about being intentional with your gatherings, paying attention to how you “open the container and close it,” how to guide your guests. You, the host, are setting the tone of your gathering. 

Why do we not have more women or diversity participating in policy making?

The current intellectual sphere (centered on Twitter) makes interaction even easier. Its cost is an eroding sense of community.

TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATIONTHROUGH PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITY

Understanding and respecting community behaviors when expressing opinions in online discussions.

Here are a few recommendations for designing a Faculty Learning Community centered around new technologies: Evolving Outcomes: Begin with clear outcomes for the community, and ask faculty to articulate their own project objectives in their applications for participation. However, keep in mind that there is an inherent openness to this process. Rework project outcomes as needed and provide progress updates at the beginning of each meeting. Multi-channel Communication: Include multiple types of interactions throughout the term to meet the many needs of participating faculty. Allow the participants to design the format of their face-to-face group meetings. Then supplement these scheduled sessions with one-on-one design meetings, online communications, self-help resources, and triage sessions. Campus Partners: Use the participant applications to imagine what types of support the faculty might need, and identify the people on campus best able to offer this support. Reach out to these campus partners in advance of the FLC, gauging their interest and availability to offer demonstrations, create online learning tools, purchase technologies, or meet with faculty one-on-one. Community Building: Remember that this is a community, and build it as such: work to develop a good rapport among participants; listen deeply to each participants’ goals; learn about disciplines outside of one’s own; require a certain level of participation; and bring drinks and food. Good learning environments tend to blend the formal and informal, supplementing expectations and plans with the free flowing nature of discussion and discovery.

FLCs are extended gatherings (typically a semester or more) in which participants organize around a clear objective but in an informal structure. Perhaps most importantly, the FLC itself is a process that develops as the group proceeds. The community members work together to direct the shape of the experience. This design engenders ownership (Cox & Richlin, 2011; Moore & Hicks 2014) in the project without requiring the faculty to become technical experts—ownership that promotes sustainable success.

Building Faculty Learning Communities: New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 97, edited by Milton D. Cox, and Laurie Richlin, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2011.

The idea behind the app is to allow people to rent something that they would only use once or very rarely. Rather than buying that expensive drill that you will only use for 15 mins, why not rent it from your neighbor?

Advantages of Online Professional Development

M. Scott Peck

careful ascommunitiesand not just asindividuals

patients in groups like these have been shown to have significantly better outcomes for an array of conditions, including diabetes and depression, than similar patients not in groups.

Experimentation, the third affordance, refers to theuse of technology to encourage participants to try outnovel ideas.

Recombinability refers to forms of technology-enabled action where individual contributors build oneach others’ contributions.

Reviewability refers to the enactment of technology-enabled new forms of working in which participantsare better able to view and manage the content offront and back narratives over time (West and Lakhani2008). By allowing participants to easily and collab-oratively review a range of ideas, technology-affordedreviewability helps the community respond to tensionsin disembodied ideas, because the reviews can provideimportant contextual information for building on others’ideas.

Technology platforms used by OCs can providea number of affordances for knowledge collabora-tion, three of which we mention here: reviewability,recombinability, and experimentation. These affordancesevolve as new participants provide new ways to use thetechnologies, new social norms are developed around thetechnology affordances, and new needs for fresh affor-dances are identified.

Given the fluid nature of OCsand their rapidly evolving technology platforms, and inline with calls to avoid dualistic thinking about tech-nology (Leonardi and Barley 2008, Markus and Silver2008, Orlikowski and Scott 2008), we suggest technol-ogy affordance as a generative response, one that viewstechnology, action, and roles as emergent, inseparable,and coevolving. Technology affordances offer a relationalperspective on human action, where neither the technol-ogy nor the actor is dominant in the sense that the tech-nology does not define what is possible for the actor todo, nor is the actor free from the limitations of the tech-nological environment. Instead, possibilities for actionemerge from the reciprocal interaction between actor andartifact (Gibson 1979, Zammuto et al. 2007). Thus, anaffordance perspective focuses on the organizing actionsthat are afforded by technology artifacts.

third response to manage tensions is to promoteknowledge collaboration by enacting dynamic bound-aries. In social sciences, although boundaries divide anddisintegrate collectives, they also coordinate and inte-grate social action (Bowker and Star 1999, Lamont andMolnár 2002). Fluidity brings the need for flexible andpermeable boundaries, but it is not only the propertiesof the boundaries but also their dynamicity that helpmanage tensions.

We have observed in OCs that no single narrative isable to keep participants informed about the current stateof the OC with respect to each tension. These commu-nities seem to develop two different types of narratives.Borrowing from Goffman (1959), we label the two nar-ratives the “front” and the “back” narratives.

Based on our collective research on to date, we haveidentified that as tensions ebb and flow, OCs use (or,more precisely, participants engage in) any of the fourtypes of responses that seem to help the OC be gen-erative. The first generative response is labeledEngen-dering Roles in the Moment. In this response, membersenact specific roles that help turn the potentially negativeconsequences of a tension into positive consequences.The second generative response is labeledChannelingParticipation. In this response, members create a nar-rative that helps keep fluid participants informed ofthe state of the knowledge, with this narrative havinga necessary duality between a front narrative for gen-eral public consumption and a back narrative to airthe differences and emotions created by the tensions.The third generative response is labeledDynamicallyChanging Boundaries. In this response, OCs changetheir boundaries in ways that discourage or encouragecertain resources into and out of the communities at cer-tain times, depending on the nature of the tension. Thefourth generative response is labeledEvolving Technol-ogy Affordances. In this response, OCs iteratively evolvetheir technologies in use in ways that are embedded by,and become embedded into, iteratively enhanced socialnorms. These iterations help the OC to socially and tech-nically automate responses to tensions so that the com-munity does not unravel.

Tension 5: Positive and Negative Consequences ofTemporary ConvergenceThe classic models of knowledge collaboration in groupsgive particular weight to the need for convergence. Con-vergence around a single goal, direction, criterion, pro-cess, or solution helps counterbalance the forces ofdivergence, allowing diverse ideas to be framed, ana-lyzed, and coalesced into a single solution (Couger 1996,Isaksen and Treffinger 1985, Osborn 1953, Woodmanet al. 1993). In fluid OCs, convergence is still likelyto exist during knowledge collaboration, but the conver-gence is likely to be temporary and incomplete, oftenimplicit, and is situated among subsets of actors in thecommunity rather than the entire community.

ension 2: Positive and Negative Consequencesof TimeA second tension is between the positive and negativeconsequences of the time that people spend contribut-ing to the OC. Knowledge collaboration requires thatindividuals spend time contributing to the OC’s virtualworkspace (Fleming and Waguespack 2007, Lakhani andvon Hippel 2003, Rafaeli and Ariel 2008). Time has apositive consequence for knowledge collaboration. Themore time people spend evolving others’ contributedideas and responding to others’ comments on thoseideas, the more the ideas can evolve

We argue that it is the fluidity, the tensions that flu-idity creates, and the dynamics in how the OC respondsto these tensions that make knowledge collaboration inOCs fundamentally different from knowledge collabora-tion in teams or other traditional organization structures.

As fluctuations in resource endowments arise overtime because of the fluidity in the OC, these fluctua-tions in resources create fluctuations in tensions, makingsimple structural tactics for managing tensions such ascross-functional teams or divergent opinions (Sheremata2000) inadequate for fostering knowledge collaboration.As complex as these tension fluctuations are for the com-munity, it is precisely these tensions that provide thecatalyst for knowledge collaboration. Communities thatthen respond to these tensions generatively (rather thanin restrictive ways) will be able to realize this potential.Thus, it is not the simple presence of resources that fos-ter knowledge collaboration, but rather the presence ofongoing dynamic tensions within the OC that spur thecollaboration. We describe these tensions in the follow-ing section

Fluidity requires us to look at the dynamics—i.e., thecontinuous and rapid changes in resources—rather thanthe presence or the structural form of the resources.Resources may flow from outside the OC (e.g., pas-sion) or be internally generated (e.g., convergence), sub-sequently influencing and influenced by action (Feldman2004). Resources come with the baggage of having bothpositive and negative consequences for knowledge col-laboration, creating a tension within the community inhow to manage the positive and negative consequencesin a manner similar to the one faced by ambidextrousorganizations (O’Reilly and Tushman 2004).

However, failure to examine the critical roleof even the inactive participants in the functioning of thecommunity is to ignore that passive (and invisible) par-ticipation may be a step toward greater participation, aswhen individuals use passivity as a way to learn aboutthe collective in a form of peripheral legitimate partici-pation (Lave and Wenger 1991, Yeow et al. 2006).

Fluidity recognizes the highly flexible or permeableboundaries of OCs, where it is hard to figure out whois in the community and who is outside (Preece et al.2004) at any point in time, let alone over time. Theyare adaptive in that they change as the attention, actions,and interests of the collective of participants change overtime. Many individuals in an OC are at various stagesof exit and entry that change fluidly over time.

We argue that fluid-ity is a fundamental characteristic of OCs that makesknowledge collaboration in such settings possible. Assimply depicted in Figure 1, we envision OCs as fluidorganizational objects that are simultaneously morphingand yet retaining a recognizable shape (de Laet and Mol2000, Law 2002, Mol and Law 1994).

a growing consensus on factors that moti-vate people to make contributions to these communities,including motivational factors based on self-interest (e.g.,Lakhani and von Hippel 2003, Lerner and Tirole 2002,von Hippel and von Krogh 2003), identity (Bagozzi andDholakia 2006, Blanchard and Markus 2004, Ma andAgarwal 2007, Ren et al. 2007, Stewart and Gosain2006), social capital (Nambisan and Baron 2010; Waskoand Faraj 2000, 2005; Wasko et al. 2009), and socialexchange (Faraj and Johnson 2011).

For instance, knowledge collaboration in OCscan occur without the structural mechanisms tradition-ally associated with knowledge collaboration in orga-nizational teams: stable membership, convergence afterdivergence, repeated people-to-people interactions, goal-sharing, and feelings of interdependence among groupmembers (Boland et al. 1994, Carlile 2002, Dougherty1992, Schrage 1995, Tsoukas 2009).

Knowledge collaboration is defined broadly as thesharing, transfer, accumulation, transformation, andcocreation of knowledge. In an OC, knowledge collab-oration involves individual acts of offering knowledgeto others as well as adding to, recombining, modify-ing, and integrating knowledge that others have con-tributed. Knowledge collaboration is a critical elementof the sustainability of OCs as individuals share andcombine their knowledge in ways that benefit them per-sonally, while contributing to the community’s greaterworth (Blanchard and Markus 2004, Jeppesen andFredericksen 2006, Murray and O’Mahoney 2007, vonHippel and von Krogh 2006, Wasko and Faraj 2000).

Online communities (OCs) are open collectives of dis-persed individuals with members who are not necessarilyknown or identifiable and who share common inter-ests, and these communities attend to both their indi-vidual and their collective welfare (Sproull and Arriaga2007).

Advancement occurs as a reward for connectedness and usefulness, not for elite recognition.

Open knowledge institutions of higher learning foreground and prioritise the constituent communities that their students, alumni, faculty, staff, administrators, partners and collaborators both comprise and promote.

The group has long been internally divided by dilemma as to whether its striving upward, should be aimed at strengthening its inner cultural and group bonds, both for intrinsic progress and for offensive power against caste; or whether it should seek escape wherever and however possible into the surrounding American culture.

what Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham describe as "that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created

Far more than a teaching method, education is a moral and political practice actively involved not only in the production of knowledge, skills and values but also in the construction of identities, modes of identification, and forms of individual and social agency.

The venerableLISTSERV email lists such as mediev-l (founded in 1992) and other medieval-focusedlistservs are early instances of the digital democratization of scholarship, conducted as anasynchronous and geographically dispersed conversation.

firstwant to consider the ways in which our increased online presence has exposed manyof the existing networks that ground the sources of academic and intellectual authority(reputation, credibility, reliability).