Produsage Communities

Montréal.
There are about eight powerpoints in this auditorium, and this time I've come in early enough to plug into one - towards the end of the previous keynote here at OOPSLA I had to switch to taking notes on my PDA as my laptop ran out of steam. The second shared keynote between OOPSLA and WikiSym 2007 today is by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner (or, Babbage Linden and Zero Linden), and we're going to hear about Second Life as a programming environment. Of course we also heard a lot about Second Life at AoIR last week, and I'm quite enjoying these presentations - if nothing else, they certainly have great visuals.

Montréal.
The next session this second day of WikiSym 2007 is on political wikis, but opens with a paper by Renée-Marie Fountain on co-constructed development via communal constructivism in an educational environment. She begins with a nod towards the idea of the wisdom of the crowds, and especially perhaps of student crowds which we touched upon yesterday, and notes that in constructivist approaches students are invited to construct learning for as well as with others. This pursues what can be described as 'impossible public goods'.

Montréal.
The final session at WikiSym 2007 today is on wiki communities, and starts with a paper by Joseph Reagle, whose research focusses on open content communities in general (probably close to what I would describe as the communities of produsage), and is interested in particular at the role of leaders in such communities. He notes seven features of what he calls authorial leadership: leadership is emergent, and is conferred based on merit and exercised through 'speaking softly'; there is mixed governance, combining meritocracy, autocracy, anarchy, and democracy at various times; leadership is an informal status, and a role as 'benevolent dictator' remains limited and temporary; leaders' key role is to channel momentum towards the development of a community culture; leadership operates through persuasion, arbitration, and defence against disruption, and accrues 'idiosyncrasy credits' (the more respected a leader, the more are they able to act idiosyncratically, autocratically, dictatorially, in the interests of the community as a last resort); there is a danger of overreaching if leaders exercise their power too enthusiastically or are positioned as uncontradictable authorities; but there is also a humour and good faith culture which militates against a glorification of the benevolent dictator. Ultimately, then, the title of benevolent dictator is a kind of tin crown, Joseph suggests; such leaders still need to tread very carefully and need to participate constructively in the community, and they cannot rest on their laurels.

Montréal.
The next session here at WikiSym 2007 begins with a short paper by Sarah Guth from the University of Padua, on wikis in education. She's done some work using social software in teaching environments, and discusses the question of whether such teaching should take place in public or non-public social software environments. Using (public) wikis enables collective authoring (which enables critical reading and responsible writing); raises issues of individual and collective ownership (challenging conventional Western epistemologies of individual intellectual property); and highlights content as ego-less, time-less, and never finished while enabling continuous development. Publishing online also empowers students, and history and discussion functions focus on writing as process, not product.

Montréal.
After the fun and excitement of AoIR 2007, I've made the quick but painful overnight trip to Montréal for the two-day International Symposium on Wikis, which takes part here in association with the much larger OOPSLA conference (in case you're wondering as I was: apparently this stands for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications). Happily, Montréal is enjoying a very pleasant Indian summer which is a welcome break from Vancouver's incessant drizzle... Naturally, the WikiSym conference also has its own wiki, which should be worth checking for comments on the presentations over the next few days.