Both the the #IndieWeb and the #DS106 community put an emphasis on first creating yoru own space on the world and then conencting with others. This common element explains much of the success of both communities. For open source and open classes to survive and grow they must cultivate the learner while also allowing the learner to cultivae using the knowledge of the community.
Dewey recgonized the impossibilty to seperate art from learning and the role of community in the art. In fact he wrote:
Hence an experience of thinking has its own aesthetic quality. It differs from those experiences that are acknowledged to be aesthetic, but only in its materials. The material of the fine arts consists of qualities; that of experience having intellectual conclusion are signs or symbols having no intrinsic quality of their own, but standing for things that may in another experience be qualitatively experienced.
The same good be said about writing yourself on the web as Dewey says for the material of fine arts. There are so many incidents of intellectual conclusions from learners in both communities. From adding a new feature to your website or building a new CMS. Yet these culminate into the aesthetic experience of building a personal digital infastructure.
The focus on the art of the experience makes both these communtiites thrive because the community itself gets sustained by the very creation of art. In other words the more people who make websites the better #ds106 and #indieweb communites act at helping people build websites.
Networks are based on voluntary association (otherwise, the forming/breaking of connections doesn't mean anything).(Downes, 2018). In these communities there are both voluntary and mandatory associations.In #DS106, there are the university students, thier instructors and all the support, systems and barriers that come with formal learning environmnets. Yet there is also a strong community of open participants that never really stop #ds1064Life.
In both #ds106 and #IndieWeb signs and symbols serve both a technical purpose and as a signiier of memmbership. In #ds106 thi is the collection of hashatags in the community. For the #IndieWeb community this is the role of microformats. These strong symbolic connections act to reinforce memmerships in the affinity spaces.
While both communtiies claim to be "headless" or lacking formal organizational structure both communities large majorities rely on authorative skills. This was evident in both the open participants of #ds106 and in the few members of the IndieWeb community that control "single points of failure." Large portions of underlying code or services are run by few members. As O'Neil noted:
The hierarchisation and control which, by all accounts, structure offline human interactions, while not formally organized does exist in single authorative points in the network (2006).
Yet it may be these single points that also drive the success of the activity of the community. In social network analysis authority is often defined as strnegth of connections. Yet in both of these communities the overall distributed network gets mantained by decentralized local communities that contribute back to the shared endeavor.
The local communities in both IndieWeb and Ds106 connect back to the larger group through a vareity of socio-technical solutions. For #DS106 this was manily commercial social media platforms. For the IndieWeb community they rely on tools more seen in the field of technology such as Slack,
Both communities demand high levels of intensive knowledge from participants. This does take work and having the time and freedom to do this work does come with privledge. Many in the #ds106 community are educators and artist who are driven to live the writerly life often as models for their students.
The #IndieWeb community remains a 100% volunteer network. The community, like much of the tech world, trends white and male but photographic records do show a long history of multi-generational learning. It must be noted the community had female founders and the first IndieWebCamp had equal gender representation. Yet the community early on made focus on inclusion. The 2011 web summit comprimised of 25% of attendees who self identified as women compared to three at prior events around the social web https://indieweb.org/2011/Guest_List#Final_Count 25% of participants were women (9/36).
Barriers of entry have been inadverntently reinfocred by the earlier barrier of entry of having your own domain. This criterion of membership was relaxed. Even in Persona work, a design activity where you draw up characters and guess their needs. Only the "cool kids" could build websites. "Tom" the developer is "38y, single/independent, technophilic, self-employed technolog,y consultant, self-optimizer. While "social media human Ellie" is "impulsive" a "unique snowflake" and 54 year old "social media skeptic Penny" is " unable to cope." While these pages represent one series of sessions from 2016-2017 they may reflect tradiational societal barriers in how characters were drawn up.
As stated around 2014 the #IndieWeb community began to refine levels of membership as having your own place online. The barriers to membership were relaxed espcially after the introduction of Homebrew Website Club. This events allowed strong authorative centers of local networks to grow.
There is a cost to these efforts, "There is a cost to all of this Maha's key note."
Participants at these sites have access to relatively holistic authoring tools, especially when compared to platform-based alternatives. While this introduced extra friction to the writing process the struggle became part of the experience (Dewey) Both communities in this study were focused on getting people online for the first time. This relied on differentiated teirs of content creation as peoiple who built ools for themsleves that became tools for the community.
DS106 and IndieWeb strive for a sense of individual ownership over not only the content of one's website but also the process of its creation. In practice, the web publishing tools used among participants have a range of prescriptiveness. Novice web designers are likely to rely upon easy-to-use content management systems such as WordPress, which are more flexible than sites like Facebook and Twitter but nonetheless encourage standardized structures including chronologically based blogs and ready-made 'themes' for determining the appearance of sites. In contrast, highly skilled participants may build their own software or write their site's HTML from scratch, in which case they can control exercise greater control over their work process and decisions. Yet the ease
Overall while in both communities the prescriptiveness of blogging platforms is proportionate to technical skill, the holistic nature of tool use can also be tasked driven as well as technical driven. Many of the remix activities encouraged in the #DS106 communities created the same sense of art of self even if these were driven on what the IndieWeb community calls commercial silos.
The communities also illustrate how technical skills are relative to the individual. Getting a domain online for a first time user can often be harder than editing a media endpoint for a web developer. In otherwords holistic tools maybecome more presecriptive to users as their skills increase. Evidence of this is seen in both communities as members begin to utilize more complex tools in spinning their personal narratives.
While the IndieWeb community created a network of blogs free from commercial silos In reality the IndieWeb has stuggled to reach what they define as "Gen 2" users over the past years. While this growth was intentional at first it may also reflect the vision of knowledge sharing in the "generations" model where one generation teaches the next. In such a model the knowledge must always trickle down the steps without learners ever picking themselves up.
In contrast the DS106 community had much greater successes for reaching novices have through structured pedagogical relationships., While not everyone, in fact the majority of people in #Ds106 will ever write their own software or HTML from scratch, but these spaces provide an opportunity for learning how to use increasingly open-ended systems and to make informed decisions about the pros and cons of prescriptive tools. This in turn can lead to a more holistic approach to the web.