Thanks to Mathemagenic for leading me to this page at CommunityWiki which points out how communities are often defined/tied to one technology and why. This is something I had kind of been thinking of all along, but the text spurred me to do something I've been meaning to all along: remove the story and forum modules from Kairosnews. All of the posts via stories and forums have now been converted to blogs. Communities, I think, don't do as well--unless they are significantly large and/or active (thinking of the open source exception mentioned in the text)--when the discourse is distributed across too many different communication technologies. Or perhaps its too many different virtual places?

Much like edubloggers have commented about other conferences, one of the most rewarding experiences of this year's 4C's was meeting other edubloggers in composition studies. Some F2F time only helps to build community among bloggers within the field.

In order to build a better community among bloggers in our field, I advocated the creation of a blog listserv. Jeff Ward of this Public Address agreed with me, although, I think, for some different reasons, as noted on his blog:

We debated whether to set up a blog or a listserv, and I argued staunchly for the listserv. The reason is one of signal to noise—mostly, the listserv is for arranging panels for next years conference with participants from geographically separated institutions, not for general blog discussion. It’s the “gated-community” aspect of listservs that helps keep conversations focused. Blogging always has an indeterminate audience, and this makes things wander. Often, that’s a good thing. Other times, it is not.

While we were at 4C's, Matt Barton told me about the actions of Retrogaming Radio against its user community. Members of the community are extremely upset that Retrogaming Radio's host and producer decided to close down the forums. According to Matt, the members of the community are not so upset about the loss of their ability to post; many have moved to the Armchair Arcade forum. However, they are concerned about the discussions which they created which are now unavailable to them. Wouldn't it be fair to allow site members to copy out their intellectual property before shutting down the forum? Seems a more peaceful solution that recognizes that their actions are injuring not only those site members that caused problems, but other active users who might deserve better treatment.

Meanwhile, while I think I can understand their reasons for closing down the forum, I do think the site owners might remember that it's when people are not talking about you that you have to worry.

Nice mention for Drupal in Stephen Downes' informative piece about creating an online discussion component for conferences.

Tom Coates of plasticbag.org has started a new weblog on community moderation called Everything in Moderation. Great stuff already. Already added it to my news aggregator.

I'll have to read through some of these later on:

Communities of Practice Documents: "The Community of Practice resources identified below represent some of the finest work available on communities of practice research and development."

[link courtesy of elearnspace blog]