One interesting way to situate HASTAC might be to name other initiatives that are allied with your work. How does the work of HASTAC relate, for example, to the Voice of the Shuttle?

I think it is hard to underestimate the force of the support provided by the traditional institutions involved in this work. While clearly this paper doesn’t propose the disbanding of all institutions of higher ed in favor of these informal, ad hoc, emergent entitities, the faculty who do this work are (I assume) largely paid their salaries and medical benefits and retirement contributions by these old-fashioned bricks and mortar (or bricks and clicks) schools that charge tuition, have endowments, etc, and therefore are powerful enablers of this work. The money matters.

Benkler spends a good deal of time thinking about open source and user generated content. One good question to ask yourself is: can you actually organize emergent behaviors? What motivates people to contribute to these sorts of projects? What does the reward structure for contributing look like? (It should be noted that one of the main reasons for Linux achieving its remarkable success is that IBM dedicated serious resources to transforming it into production-level code as a means of avoiding having to pay license fees for its servers. )