Social Tagging in Community Memories

Communities form in order to manage and defend a commons and Community Memories are distributed information systems that help them do so. This paper discusses the use of tagging within Community Memories. We argue that the role of tagging goes beyond being an aid in navigation. It is a means by which communities come to grips with the tensions and challenges of their environment through the bottom-up construction of a common ontology and a representation of themselves. 1 Collective Intelligence and Community Memories Social tagging burst on the scene a few years ago through sites like CiteULike and Flickr and is now a routine component of many content provisioning and content sharing web sites. The idea of tagging is straightforward: Users associate tags (words) of their own choosing with media items like pictures, text, video, etc., and they can then browse through these items by using the tags. For any given item they see the tags and for any tag they can find back the items that have been tagged that way. Tags are then made visible to a whole group of users and frequency of occurrence as well as co-occurrence is displayed in the form of tag clouds which thus visualise the emergent ’folksonomy’. Browsing can be further enhanced by adding content processing, such as visual feature detection, or signal and text processing[12]. It is remarkable that despite the totally distributed activities of users, there are nevertheless clear trends detectable in the usage of tags [8], [4], which is why tagging can act as a bottom-up alternative to the top-down design of ontologies practiced for the semantic web. Social tagging has so far been been used for a class of applications that is generally classified under the header of Collective Intelligence. Websites like Last.FM, Deli.cio.us, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc. bring together media materials that are uploaded and downloadable by a huge group of users. These materials can be considered a (creative) commons [10]. Users now routinely tag their own materials or those of others in a fully distributed way and statistical methods are used to detect co-occurrence or other network properties of tags. Although most of the Collective Intelligence projects have social networking tools, users generally speaking do not know each other personally and have the possibility to be entirely anonymous. There is no particular shared interest among users, except that they are all interested in similar materials. Here we are interested in a quite different class of applications of ’Web 2.0’ technologies, which we call Community Memories. Although they use the same technologies as Collective Intelligence projects, their main purpose is entirely different. They are intended to build and support communities. We do not define a community here in terms of family, ethnicity, or social strata (us against them), but rather in terms of a commons: A community is a group of individuals that cooperate to manage a particular commons. A commons can be as basic as water and air, but it can also be space on the road, wood in the forest, access to public spaces, bandwidth for information transmission, cultural artefacts, political opinion, reputation, etc. To have a sustainable commons requires first of all that a balance is maintained between input and output, which means that those who take from the commons must ensure that the processes to regenerate it are in place. Second, there are almost always conflicts between those that supply input and those that take output, as well as among those that take output under the condition of scarcity. The strongest form of egoism occurs in those who take whatever they want from the commons without inputting themselves and the strongest form of conflict occurs if some take whatever they want from the commons based on violence against other users of the commons, including theft. There is often a conflict between a particular community that is managing a commons and outsiders or other communities that feel they should have the right of access to the output of the same commons. The management of the commons is a primary function of human groups and if it is not done right, the suffering can be immense or the destruction of the commons can be swift. Given this importance and given that there are now many ecological, social and cultural systems under severe threat, we believe that collective tools for managing a commons should be a key concern. The issues are just as pressing for modern densely populated urban societies, as it is for indigenous seminomadic communities which are trying to preserve their rain forest environment against the onslaught of logging companies. Particularly communities whose members are illiterate,