This such a delightful and useful metaphor. What a great way of explaining the real joy and challenges facing Wikipedians in 2008 and in the present.

How have the percieved and real boundaries and borders of these four neighborhoods changed over time? What other research could be done to understand the development of distinct neighborhood identitities and organizing efforts?

This is a really fascinating argument to me.

Read more about workplace bias at museums in Bias Cache: Collecting Incidents and Interruptions of Workplace Bias in Museums by Aletheia Wittman, Rose Paquet Kinsley, and Margaret Middleton, May 16, 2016.

What a quick and accessible approach to evaluation! You can do this yourself to evaluate your own organization or you can try this approach to form a constructive critique of a partner in your community.

You can find video, slides, and notes from Nikhil Trivedi's 2015 Ignite talk at the MCN conference on his website.

Thanks to Elissa Frankle for sharing her slides for this presentation on Slideshare. The people and hashtags recognized at the beginning of the talk include: Alli Hartley, Teresa Martinez, Nikhil Trivedi, Alyssa Greenberg, Monica Montgomery, Lesley Kadish, Sina Bahram, #museumworkersspeak, #fightfor15, Adrianne Russell, Gretchen Jennings, Aleia Brown, Carol Bossert, Matt Adler, Liz Ogbu, Cait Reizman, Jason Alderman, and #museumsrespondtoferguson.

When I reflect on the expense of graduate studies, I wonder about what other related issues need to be addressed at the same time. How can we design lessons, courses, programs, and departments that work well for full-time and part-time students? Students who begin graduate school immediately after undergrad and students who have been out of school for years?

How do you listen? Do you collect survey data from visitors? Is that data aggregated and shared with the public? How do you respond to survey results or other information you take in from outside your museum (or department or community group)?

How do you create a safe space? How do you keep a safe places for people who engage in in-person and online communities?

One way to pursue this goal is to use and apply community guidelines (here our guidelines at Baltimore Heritage) to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment in your classroom, historic sites, or community meeting.

This is an important question that we should all be asking in our own way even if we don't work at a museum. For example, at Baltimore Heritage we can ask:

• Do we value historic buildings more than the people who live in them?
• Do we value old photos more than the people depicted and their descendants?

Meeting people "where they are" is difficult when a university campus is literally or figuratively separate from the surrounding communities. Staff or volunteers with historic sites and museums often encounter similar challenges.

At UMBC, initiatives such as Breaking Ground try to bridge these gaps by bringing students into surrounding communities. Museums and historic sites may find useful advice in "Positioning Your Museum as a Critical Community Asset: A Practical Guide" available as an online resource and a 2016 book.

How can scholars and educators create classroom spaces that work as "commons"? How can you seek this goal both online and in-person?

Two useful approaches to active listening include:

• Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process (See this short video about the process)
• Stanford Design School's “I Like, I Wish, What If” Method of Feedback (PDF)

Students and scholars may use tools that are unfamiliar to outside partners such as Blackboard or other learning management systems. Community groups or nonprofit partners often have limited time or resources to invest in buying or learning how to use a new tool. Recognize the limits of existing tech skills & infrastructure but don't be afraid to try something new.

Find more tools using ProfHacker, a group blog published by the Chronicle for Higher Education, by browing categories for reviews, software, productivity, and teaching.

"Social infrastructure" is only one term that can be used to talk about this idea. Other similar concepts include:

• Community identity
• Organizational capacity (or capability)
• Social capital

Some approaches, such as network weaving or capacity building, seek to expand or strengthen these relationships to build more effective organizations. Read more in "Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving" (PDF) by Valdis Krebs and June Holley.

This engagement guide is written for readers with an interest in civic technology. But it remains relevant for many other domains. Try translating this guide by replacing the words "civic technology" with...

• Course design
• Educational technology
• Public history
• Public humanities
• Or some other topic of interest to you.

Are all five modes of civic engagement still useful to you? Which approaches work for your field? Which do not?

1. Start with people: Work with the real people and real communities you are part of, represent, and/or are trying to serve
2. Cater to context: Leverage and operate with an informed understanding of the existing social infrastructure and sociopolitical contexts that affect your work
3. Respond to need: Let expressed community ideas, needs, wants, and opportunities drive problem-identification and problem-solving
4. Build for best fit: Develop solutions and tools that are the most useful to the community and most effectively support outcomes and meet needs
5. Prove it: Demonstrate and document that community needs, ideas, skills, and other contributions are substantially integrated into — and drive — the lifecycle of the project."

From Criteria: People First, Tech Second

The structure and rhythm of the academic calendar can make it more difficult for students and scholars to work closely with community-partners.

How do you make time for students and scholars to create something for a community, listen to community input, and incorporate ideas from community members into their work? Can this take place in a single semester?

Could this be encouraged by providing students with sample presentation materials? Or creating a project style guide that students could optionally use to ensure the project is presented through a consistent voice or visual design?

Open licensing with Creative Commons (or other open-source licenses) is one way of setting guidelines for reuse of project materials in whole or in part.

This is not only important for students but also for projects that involve collaboration with community partners.

If members of a community where you are doing research or teaching are contributing photos, stories, or feedback to a project, scholars need to ensure that community members can access their own contributions into the future.

To accomplish this goal for students and community partners, scholars need to make a digital preservation plan at or near the beginning of any project. Learn more about personal archiving from the Library of Congress.

Collaborative tools and equitable approaches can help make sure your meetings and project communication meet this important standard.

Examples include:

• Using Google Docs for collaborating on meeting agendas and note-taking (See ProfHacker on Google Docs and collaboration in the classroom)
• Using Trello for project planning and roadmapping (See examples of public roadmapping with Trello)
• Using conscious language when communicating by email, chat, or in-person (Get help from the Conscious Style Guide)
• Using techniques that encourage equitable participation (e.g. AdaInitiative's unconference session role cards)

"Milking the Deficit Internship," January 6, 2016 (2016 MLA Position Papers, Digital Edition) by Spencer D. C. Keralis is another relevant reading on labor and power in the academy and the student labor economy.

How do you empower student or outside partners to make "credit decisions about the intellectual design" when they may not share the same knowledge or approach as a scholar? In some cases, this is a difficult question to answer.

This is an excellent suggestion! If this support is built into the student-scholar collaboration, then it ensures all student collaborators receive credit for their contributions—not just students who seek that support from scholars.

How do you give credit to collaborators? Think about an academic book. A work might include a dedication to a beloved partner or mentor; an introduction listing student researchers; citations of influential works; an afterword on the history of the research project.

To name your collaborators, write a list:

• Names for everyone who contributes to a project;
• each person's role or contributions;
• when those contributions took place;
• and how to contact them if you have questions later.

You need to tell collaborators how credit may be presented at the outset and tell them when you fulfill that promise.

Consider these questions:

• Are there any contributions that do not require credit?
• Do all collaborators receive credit in the same way or place?

Take five minutes to watch “Pay your F-ing Interns” by Elissa Frankle, an Ignite talk for the Openlab Workshop Unconference, December 1, 2015, in Crystal City, VA.

This is a helpful introduction to organizing zine-making workshops that could be useful to librarians, historians, or educators.

I wonder how this works in a classroom context and not just a workplace. Could you invite students to learn about a topic and then use this exercise to generate project ideas?