@joguldi A walled garden? A walled garden?!!!! You’re killing me, @joguldi!!

We imagined the CUNY Academic Commons as the antithesis of a walled garden, since a walled garden was exactly what we had in Blackboard (or in Sharepoint, which some administrators pushed for). Instead, we wanted a site that would be built according to the ethos of open-source, guerrilla communications that you’ve described.

What we’ve tried to do is to build a stable space that could serve as an aggregation point for each member’s content, so that every guerrilla could build elsewhere as she wished but could also have a base camp on the Commons (sorry for the tortured metaphor). We chose to go with WordPress precisely because it plays well with services like del.icio.us, twitter, and flickr. The idea is that members of the site can continue to use those services, but can simply import their feeds into their Commons spaces so that they can share that information in the context of the CUNY community. Since, as Boone points out, most of the site is out in the open, I’m not sure how or why you see it as walled.

The issue that Boone’s post alludes to, but doesn’t fully articulate, is that we started this project to deal with a problem particular to the structure of CUNY that Boone describes: we have 23 campuses in a very small geographic area; although we all try to keep up with one another, the members of one campus often don’t know what people on another campus are doing. And so, the idea of building a central, collaborative space — one that would bring a greater sense of unity to the university — began. And yet, as Boone’s title implies, we’ve taken pains not to be overly prescriptive. Our goal has been to create an organic site that would take its cues from its members and from its nascent, growing community.

@jouldi – Your response doesn’t sound unorthodox at all! I totally agree with the spirit behind your sentiment. In an ideal world, collaborative spaces would be broad enough to effectively encompass everyone. There would be no need for “walled gardens” (though, I should note, the CUNY Academic Commons is only private insofar as you must be a member of the CUNY community to actually create content there – the content itself is public). But there are a couple of justifications for local communities like the one we’re building:
– The CUNY community is large enough to support it
– The members of the CUNY community share a culture that is in many ways unique to the institution, which means in turn that the kind of space that might work for them is not necessarily the kind of space that works for the more general public (or even the more general academic public)
– Perhaps most importantly, there are many shades of gray between traditional, isolated scholarship and open, fully collaborative scholarship. Even if true openness is the ultimate goal (which is an idea that has strong arguments in its favor, even if it’s not 100% certain), to make it the only alternative to the traditional ways threatens to scare off too many scholars who are mildly uncomfortable with the idea of sharing. The partially closed nature of the Commons provides some protection for these individuals.

I’ve blogged about my own community of academics and para-academics in delicious. I also had a lot of joy out of using flickr, rather than omeka, for my undergraduates.

In both cases, the functionality suits what I need, as a researcher/pedagogue, just fine. Putting the stuff in public, where the tags are findable via traditional methods (not locked in a walled garden), is a choice — in favor of dialogue with the public over control.

It isn’t the choice for everybody, but it’s an important criteria to think about for humanities academics committed to the idea of the public intellectual.