Transcendent communities

Online communities are potential arenas for informal and lifelong learning. Even though technology fosters internal sharing and collaboration in online communities, it also presents excessively strong external boundaries. These silo-like structures lead to fragmentation, counteracting cross-community collaboration and interdisciplinary learning. We are revising our own online community software to support a particular sociotechnical pattern: the emergence of "transcendent communities"--networks of participation that transcend collections of related but distinct communities. In order to understand such inter-community activity we have developed a theoretical analysis of the basis for individual action and how this action can lead to value for the larger community. Investigating the relationships between individual action, social affordances of the technology and group identities will help us to design for functionality and for meaning.