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@gmail.com> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] Looking for examples of aggregation communities Message-ID: <AANLkTik9YJ1_bizCZs3sWi=qVf3= -gzFtgg3rLVcwO4A@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 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@gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius