if:book has just posted about a new project: MediaCommons. From a theoretical standpoint, this is an exciting collection of ideas for a new scholarly community, and I wish if:book the best in building and promoting MediaCommons.

From a pragmatic standpoint, however, I would offer the following advice which I also discussed this weekend with the WPA during their yearly conference in regards to revising the existing WPA site and offering new services to members. The "If We Build It, They Will Come" strategy of web community development is laudable, but often doomed to failure. There are many projects around the web which are inspired by great ideas, yet they fail. Installing and configuring a content management system website is the easy part. Creating content for the site and building a community of people who use it is much harder. I feel it is typically better to limit the scope of a project early on and create a smaller community space in which the project can grow, then add more to serve the community's needs over time (more on this later).

Since I won't be at C&W this year, I was glad to get a chance to view Dan Anderson's new media video presentation for the conference (thanks, Dan!). As Dan argues, and I think rightly so, the "lone author is better able to produce a new media instructional resource" than the "outsource production" model of new media instructional text production.

But I don't think it's that the "power of autonomy and individual authorship undermine[s] collaborative paradigms," but rather that the power of collaboration is undermined by attachment to individual authorship/ownership. Our society's acculturation to IP as something to be owned often acts as a set of blinders, one which overly privileges multi-individual projects without much collboration. To embrace collaboration is to understand that outsource production model Dan describes is not a production "team"; rather, it's more like a manufacturing process which outsources production of different components to other companies and then assembles them together. Not a creative process at all. Ugh!

But seriously, this is too neat a process, not messy enough. You can engineer a car, but engineering a creative text about producting creative new media works?