Steak Knives

I found Wales particularly interesting as he put to rest Wikipedia's notoriety as a prototypical Web 2.0 application, especially when people assume that the moniker Web 2.0 refers to a set of technologies. There are virtually no technical innovations, he explained, as most of the underlying pieces were invented over a decade ago: Ward Cunningnam invented the wiki over 10 years ago, for example.

Rather, Wikipedia is a social innovation and Wales used restaurant design as a metaphor. Your new dining establishment intends to sell steaks, so therefore you'll need to provide sharp knives to your customers. Knives are also weapons and people could stab one another with them, so rather than booths and tables, you'd better lock your customers in individual cells to prevent that behavior.

Absurd, of course. Society has built up a collective set of agreements to ensure this sort of thing doesn't occur. Community software, however, often resorts to those sort of draconian constraints to require or forbid specific activity.

The success of Wikipedia can be traced back to exploiting the community trust, and backing it by social norms that have emerged as the site has grown and evolved. But more interesting is the attenuation that the community has developed for these emergent patterns and the methods they use to build on them.