[Air-L] Looking for examples of aggregation communities

[Matthew Bernius]

Two thoughts...

Historically, there is some similarities with the Oxford English
Dictionaries. Essentially contributors serve as first round editors,
collecting and aggregating the earliest known usages of each word. Of
course, this is still a hierarchical organization and traditionally I don't
think it was much of a "community" -- still it might be a useful reference.

Fictionally, you might want to look at the second part of Cory Doctorow's
"Makers" which revolve around theme park/museums that are curated by people
who ride them.

- Matt

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:03:54 -0400
From: Derek Hansen <shakmatt at gmail.com>
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: [Air-L] Looking for examples of aggregation communities
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Colleagues,

I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help
amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them. The
example we are examining is the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates
data from many different scientific databases (and user-generated
content such as Flickr images) into a coherent whole. The participants
are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve
content rather than create it. They also do a lot of work to integrate
the original content into a coherent whole.

What similar examples exist on the web today? What examples have
existed for decades or centuries?

Thanks ahead of time for any examples or thoughts.
Derek Hansen
Assistant Professor
iSchool
University of Maryland



-----------------------------
Matthew Bernius
PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University |
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/
Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of
Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl
mBernius at gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius