Collaborative Knowledge Building: Ethnographic Insights from Geni.com

Pamela Wilson, Ph.D. Reinhardt University, Department of Communication, Waleska, Georgia USA

PSW@reinhardt.edu

Abstract. This article provides an ethnographic case study of a Web 2.0 genealogy and social media site, Geni.com, that provides the structure and tools for collaborative knowledge building as six million users contribute to and construct the largest interconnected genealogical database in human history. The author examines this process as part of a new Web 2.0 paradigm for cultural, educational and business practices.

I. INTRODUCTION

“The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide -- along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more -- are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass co-operation across time and space is suddenly economical.” (Hof, 2005) [1]

French cyberspace theorist Pierre Levy uses the term “collective intelligence” to describe the large-scale information gathering and processing activities that have emerged in web communities. On the internet, he argues, people harness their individual expertise towards shared goals and objectives: “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity”[2]. Educators and researchers in a wide range of fields, as well as corporations, are seeking to understand how they might harness the power of these growing repositories of knowledge to address many different types of needs.

Research in the field of education during the past two decades has focused upon social theories of learning that involve “collaborative learning” and “collaborative knowledge building” in “communities of practice” (as defined by Etienne Wenger) [3]. The concept of collaborative knowledge building (CKB) was first introduced by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter (1994) who proposed that schools should function as knowledge building communities. Later, Scardamalia (1998) would define knowledge building communities as “any group of individuals dedicated to sharing and advancing the knowledge of the collective,” and posit that they are “defined not by formal association or physical

proximity but a commitment to invest resources in the collective upgrading of knowledge” [4].

Various studies since that time have examined the motivations for involvement in virtual or online knowledge-building communities [5], the interpersonal and group processes by which such groups accomplish their goals [6], and have posited applied models and frameworks for “knowledge building and collective wisdom advancement in a virtual learning community” [7] for various types of educational settings. As Gurparkash Singh explains, “Knowledge building involves production and continual improvement of ideas which are of value to a community” [8].

As a media studies and intercultural communication scholar, the author has been quite interested in exploring the ways that web-based communities are created and maintained across cultural and geographical boundaries and especially the ways that such communities can work together to achieve common goals. A related interest is in how the internet provides individuals in contemporary culture a locus through which they can engage not only as citizens and consumers but also as producers within participatory communities of sharing and collaborative knowledge building. Especially intriguing are the ways that the recent shifts in internet culture have created hybrid sites for engagement that are constantly renegotiating the intersections between producers and consumers (or audience), between capitalism and democratic idealism, between commercial and non-profit motives, between private interests and the public good. Such sites also navigate the boundaries of public and private knowledge and information, individual and collective authorship and ownership of information, professional (or scholarly) and amateur (or popular) status, and between commodity culture and knowledge culture.

A non-professional genealogy enthusiast for about 25 years, the author has been involved in online genealogy communities of various types since 1997 and published her first academic article on the topic in 1999. Genealogy has proven to be an absolutely fascinating endeavor from which to gain insights about personal and cultural identity, as well as about the historical development and maintenance of social class, racial and ethnic identities. The practice of genealogy also raises questions about how to meaningfully study and incorporate knowledge

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about the past into our present lives in an increasingly fragmented and alienating postmodern world.

For a cultural studies scholar, genealogy can deepen an understanding of connections between local or familial and larger regional or global movements in history, helping to understand the deep structures of connectedness within small communities and helping one to personally appreciate the patterned flow of social and cultural history through the lives of real, everyday, average participants in that history. Being able to see one's own ancestors’ roles in that history has been very exciting and has made history come alive for the author far more than did textbook history in school. Having students participate in genealogical discovery is an excellent teaching method used by the author, who incorporates a cultural roots project into her university-level intercultural communication course each year, an assignment that students always find very meaningful. It encourages them to talk to their elder family members about the family's history and also encourages them to begin to explore archival and historical records.

In fact, the author's discovery of Geni.com came when a student in this course introduced the author to the website as part of the student project. Intrigued by Geni's features, the author originally joined in order to upload her family history data and share it with other members of her extended families. This led to an involvement with Geni which has allowed her to observe how new media has the possibility to transform the process of “doing genealogy” from an individual research practice into a practice of collaborative knowledge building. Geni goes far beyond a site that merely computerizes the efforts of individuals to build and display their family trees online. Instead, the product that this ever-evolving company is an “architecture for participation”: an infrastructure that is allowing millions of users worldwide to engage in a history-making effort. Through Geni's tools, these users can consolidate their own personal family trees into a joint historical mapping of genetic and cultural kinship structures extending back a thousand years or more, creating a reverse pyramid of interconnected ancestors that Geni users hope (idealistically) will eventually include everyone in the world.

Figure 1. The John G. Chandler family. The author's paternal grandmother Cara Chandler (front row, second from right) and her siblings and parents, circa 1907, in rural North Carolina (USA).

What users are discovering on Geni, with a growing body of pretty solid evidence, is that we are all cousins if we go back far enough. Of course, the pragmatics of this is overwhelming, and the challenge for Geni is to keep developing and rolling out the technology and the structures to keep up with the needs identified by the group of avid Geni users across the globe.

Geni provides a space for the new and emerging types of knowledge culture that Henry Jenkins has described: new forms of community emerging within participatory cultures that are increasingly being created online. As Jenkins has explained, “The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminishing, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating and our allegiances to nation states are being redefined.“ Jenkins explains that these new communities “are defined through voluntary, temporary and tactical affiliations, are reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments and are held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge” [9].

As a member of Geni since 2008, the author was involved first as what one might call a “superuser” (not a casual user but one committed and deeply involved in a site) and for the past six months as a curator during a new phase in which Geni empowered a group of users to serve voluntarily as administrators. The goal during this period on Geni has been to collaboratively create a consolidated genealogical database--and a public knowledge base--that provides well-researched biographical and historical information on historical personages. However, unlike Wikipedia, which provides similar biographical information in historical individuals, Geni provides an additional dimension since Geni’s information on individuals is connected through a genealogical relationship structure not only with each other but with contemporary users. Not only can one read about a famous medieval figure and her

Figure 2.

Excerpt from 1910 U.S. Federal

Census for the John G. Chandler family (pictured

lower left) of Person County, North Carolina

(USA)

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accomplishments, but a Geni user can also calculate his or her familial relationship to the figure: “Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen consort of England and France, is your 22nd great grandmother.” Now that is exciting—and personal.

Geni also allows users to collaboratively create and build Projects, which allow for the development of historical, cultural and familial knowledge that goes beyond an individual’s profile. Projects may include groupings of individuals into families, dynasties, participants in historical events or movements, members of particular communities, or other common organizing elements.

II. THE CASE OF GENI.COM

Geni is a dynamic Web 2.0 platform set up to enable collaborative knowledge building for genealogy. The company’s self-description on its website reads:

Geni is solving the problem of genealogy by inviting the world to build the definitive online family tree. Using the basic free service, users add and invite their relatives to join their family tree, which Geni compares to other trees. Matching trees are then merged into the single world family tree.... Pay services include enhanced research tools as well as keepsake products created from family tree data. Geni welcomes casual genealogists and experts who wish to discover new relatives and stay in touch with family [10].

Geni was founded in 2006 and launched in January 2007 as the brainchild of David Sacks, formerly the Chief Operations Officer of Paypal, and funded with venture capital. Sacks announced Geni as “a new website with an ambitious goal: to create a family tree of the whole world!” Sacks and his partners/investors positioned Geni to occupy a distinctive niche, targeting genealogy enthusiasts and their families by including social media features that would allow both social networking (with family members) and collaborative family tree-building in a way never before done technologically. As a Geni staff member recounted,

David was itching to get back into technology, and he had an idea for doing something like Facebook for families / Wikipedia for genealogy. He teamed up with Alan Braverman, CTO and co-founder of a couple other successful sites (Xoom and Eventbrite)…. When the company was founded in 2006, social networking was all the rage. David and Alan consider the name "Wikigenia" for the company, but feeling that the company would find more success in family social networking than hard-core genealogy, settled on the more colloquial name Geni [11].

Many other online genealogy sites existed at the time; however, most of the online genealogy sites prior to 2005 either provided (1) the technology to build and display one’s own family tree or (2) historical resources and research material that had been digitized. Geni offered something distinctive.

Geni's popularity increased dramatically. As of late March 2011, Geni had six million users who had created 100 million profiles of either contemporary or ancestral persons, of which over 54 million profiles were interconnected in what Geni users informally call the “Big Tree.” This Big Tree, a development that has unfolded over the years through the initiative of Geni users, is a collaboratively built and curated genealogical knowledge base that connects living members back through the generations with ancestors as well as collateral relatives.

On Geni, each person, living or dead, has a profile (not unlike a Facebook profile, though the profiles for non-living persons are not “claimed” or occupied; rather, they are managed by living people, usually descendants or other relatives). Users' individual trees are connected by merging duplicate profiles in “overlapping” family trees, with the goal of having only one shared profile per historical person on Geni. The process of merging is premised on finding duplicate profiles for the same person so that each user shares management of these profiles and can collaboratively develop and add information about the person's life through a wiki-type system of data and text entry. About 25,000 users per month participated in merging activities in early 2011.

Over time, this author became more deeply involved in the interactive community of Geni users, actively partnering with other users in problem-solving and trying to find ways to use the constantly-evolving technology provided by Geni to achieve new and innovative goals. In spite of the fact that Geni is an American-based company, based in California, it soon became evident that the group of superusers was quite international. They soon began to discover the strengths and specialties of each member of the community and became mutually supportive. There was also, as might be expected, some conflict surrounding those members who wanted to be possessive and territorial rather than collaborative.

The development of the Big Tree, which would soon become Geni's prime asset, was completely user-driven. In June 2008, two users requested that merge their common ancestor, thereby creating the first conjoined trees. The following month, Geni announced the new feature of Tree Merging, and the Big Tree was born. The superusers learned and shared all kinds of secrets and shortcuts to overcome shortcomings in the system design, but the capabilities were still limited, and explicit permission was needed from each profile manager for each merge.

At this point, the loose group of Geni superusers was beginning to put into practice the conditions needed to support knowledge building outlined by Cindy Hmelo-Silver, building on Scardamalia’s model [12]:

• First, people must work on knowledge problems that arise from attempts to understand the world.

• Second, they must work with the goal of improving the coherence, quality, and utility of ideas.

• Third, participants must negotiate a fit between their own ideas and those of others and use the

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differences they find to catalyze knowledge ad-vancement.

• Fourth, there must be collective responsibility for advancing the community’s understanding, and all participants must contribute.

• Fifth, participants must take a critical stance as they use various information sources.

• Finally, there must be knowledge-building dis-course, which is more than knowledge sharing. In this kind of discourse, participants engage in con-structing, refining, and transforming knowledge.

Geni's well-developed social media features increasingly provided sites for knowledge-building discourse—a forum, discussion boards, a wiki, blog, private messaging—and Hmelo-Silver’s first, second and fifth conditions were easily negotiated. Stumbling blocks initially came from (and continue to come from) the third and fourth conditions: negotiating between conflicting ideas and visions, and getting all participants to contribute.

There were many roadblocks and much frustration in the early days. Privacy and permissions were a huge factor, since Geni had created its system with a commitment to ensure the privacy of an individual’s family information. If another user were to find a common ancestor or relative, he or she would need to message the first user with a request to merge their trees. Often, however, users would upload trees and then abandon them—and therefore would not answer requests.

A breakthrough of sorts came with two Geni developments in 2009: (1) the formal distinction between private and public profiles, which provided an automatic veil of privacy around living persons and their closest relatives (out to one’s third great grandparents and fourth cousins) but made the profiles beyond this level “public” and thus more accessible for merging, and (2) the development of the collaborators system, allowing a user to give another user blanket permission to make changes to his or her tree. This built upon the informal networks that the users had been developing on their own and enabled a more participatory and collaborative work.

The core group of superusers developed an extensive knowledge of which people carried keys to particular non-responsive managers and began posting lists requesting merging help from each other. This system went on for about two years, using the discussion boards and personal messaging. This intensive collaborative work created a close community of superusers who increasingly became the mentors for new users and who took collective responsibility for advancing the functionality of Geni’s infrastructure to achieve collective goals.

In addition to merging, another major concern of the superusers was the desire to ensure the historical accuracy of the genealogical and biographical information. As in any open-source system, there was also the frustration of having "cleaned up" a branch of a family tree—all the relationships correctly sorted out, sources documented, biographical profiles researched and

written—and then having someone new come and merge incorrectly, leaving the profiles in a mess again. To prevent this, superusers needed the ability to “lock” profile information—but the Geni staff was very wary of doing this because of the commitment to each user’s right to access his or her own ancestral information (even if it was shared with dozens or even hundreds of other users) and because of the Geni management’s desire to move more into an open-source model similar to Wikipedia.

Superusers were regularly pressuring Geni for more tools to augment the architecture of participation. In January 2010, a group (including the author) submitted a detailed proposal for the creation of a system to designate Master Profiles for each historical personage, into which all duplicate profiles of the same person would be merged, along with a proposal asking Geni to appoint curators to build, administer, and monitor the profiles to ensure historical accuracy and responsible source documentation. Geni at first did not act upon it, and frustrations continued to grow as the family tree on Geni grew more and more entangled.

However, in the summer of 2010, operations manager Noah Tutak became the new President of Geni. Tutak had also been actively involved as a user with his own family tree. Tutak immediately began to make positive changes. Extremely responsive to users, and especially to those superusers that he had grown to know and respect, he created an initial advisory group of curators (and the author was honored to be one of the chosen) and then asked this group for input on developing the curator system, which has since that time radically transformed the Geni landscape and led to the kind of collaborative knowledge building model outlined by Hmelo-Silver. Geni currently has about 75 curators with access to special tools and privileges. Tutak also introduced the Master Profile system and granted curators the option to lock information as needed (though many users and curators object to any practices that control data or limit open access).

With the new system, curators may merge any two public profiles without needing a manager’s permission, which has removed many roadblocks to creating consolidated Master Profiles. Curators have taken on different specialty areas and work hand-in-hand with other users on “cleaning up” different corners of the Big Tree, from different historical periods, geographical areas, and special groups linked together historically or culturally.

Figure 3. Master Profile of Eleanor of Aquitaine on Geni

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III. FROM WEB 1.0 TO WEB 2.0

“The evolution of the World Wide Web from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is creating subtle but profound changes in the ways human beings locate and access information, communicate with, and learn from each other. The changes in technologies are driving changes in human behavior, interactions, and knowledge acquisition.” (Gunawardena 2009) [13]

Geni is distinctive from other computer-based genealogy software or online genealogy sites in a number of ways. Imagine a Facebook-type social networking site in which user profiles (both the living and the ancestors) are interconnected into a family tree structure and network. Geni differentiates between private and public profiles, which are those that can be shared and collaboratively developed, and Geni offers a Wikipedia-style open-source text area for creating historical research narratives for public profiles, with the ability to attach photos, documents and source materials. Geni also provides discussion forums, a Facebook-like messaging system, email notifications, and other social media features. Geni’s technological tools are in constant development, with new releases and enhancements every week or two in response to the needs and requests of the curators and other users.

Earlier online genealogy sites of the 1995-2005 period were developed in what is sometimes called Web 1.0 style and philosophy. This means that their content is flat and text-based—the transference of the print media model to the web simply by digitizing or scanning content and making it accessible online. Web 1.0 material in a corporate environment is generally produced and distributed by the corporation and consumed by users. These earlier models were knowledge storage and organization systems first. They enabled the display of personal genealogical research and the ability to share it online. Web 1.0 email listservs and online discussion forums allowed for posting of queries and responses on various topics. The emphasis of Web 1.0 genealogy was on private, individual data gathering, on sharing via email or message board (and often by sending information through “snailmail” on paper or on CD-ROMs). Another key development of this era was the thrust to digitize public archival and historical documents and get them on the web so that historical and genealogical research could increasingly be done online.

The concept and terminology of Web 2.0 began in 2004 and soon, as Jenkins notes, “became the cultural logic for e-business—a set of corporate practices which seek to capture and exploit participatory culture..., Web 2.0 represented a re-organization of the relations between producers and consumers in a maturing Internet market” [14]. At that time, the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies, as outlined by Tim O'Reilly, were [15]:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability

• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them

• Trusting users as co-developers • Harnessing collective intelligence • Leveraging the long tail through customer self-

service • Software above the level of a single device • Lightweight user interfaces, development mod-

els, and business models

Geni clearly embraced this model in its conception, its structure, and its relationship to its consumers.

From an idealistic perspective, Web 2.0 can be celebrated as a more democratic, empowering, participatory model of information sharing. In the Web 2.0 model, companies provide the structural architecture and technological tools to encourage and enable user participation, but what is actually done with those tools in less than predictable–in fact, it is emergent and allows for innovation and often-surprising results. Users are treated as co-developers rather than consumers. In this mode, knowledge is produced collaboratively, with the wiki model of collaborative writing and editing being dominant.

Geni’s corporate approach is to provide technology—not content. Geni provides the tools that enable the users to generate the content. Geni seems to be committed to providing free access to that content to any user. The primary way that Geni monetizes its product is by offering a subscription-based level of membership (called Pro) which does not provide access to any protected content but rather provides more technological tools to enable users to maneuver through the data and to collaborate more easily.

Geni’s approach has also been to be user-driven in its development. The ongoing technological innovations have been in direct response to needs identified by users, and Geni’s staff members have been keen listeners and have actively participated in dialogue with users through the forum, the public discussions, and the curator discussions.

Figure 4. James Nash (1797-1880) and Nancy Horner

(1802-1889) of Greenville County, South Carolina (USA), the author's third great-grandparents.

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Web 2.0 also blurs, or even eliminates, the cultural distinction between the professional and the amateur producer of knowledge, and may thus be celebrated as a levelling and ultimately democratic process in which each user begins on equal footing and through which users distinguish themselves through the merits of their work and the reputations they build. The traditional concepts of media content producer and audience/consumer have, as the author has discussed elsewhere, “become loosened and seem to float more freely; the role of producer has been liberated from the industrial model and is now open for anyone to occupy”:

The rise of media venues that allow “ordinary people” to voice and visualize their perspectives has had a tremendous effect on the mediascape. Citizen journalism, blogs, social media, You-Tube, wikis—all have led to a blurring of the boundary between the producer and audience of traditional television and related media. The elimination, or minimizing, of the need for and authority of experts as “gatekeepers” has resulted in a new kind of energized media empowerment [in which] former “audience members” have in many cases become the producers/agents of media … via the internet, where they may (or may not) find both local and global audiences [16].

Similarly, the empowerment of the amateur (and the impact this has had on the professional media producer) has been profound in an era in which anyone can assert and demonstrate their own expertise.

Geni’s approach has been to appeal to the “ordinary people” interested in exploring their family history with family members. Geni hoped to tap into the burgeoning of interest in genealogy as a hobby and cultural practice, especially among the younger, web-savvy generations but also leaving space for older enthusiasts as well. As one of Geni’s corporate statements explained:

Conventional genealogy applications and websites are primarily individual research tools. Users search public records and build their own family trees, separate from the trees of others. Thus, every family tree is potentially a duplicate of past work. We think this is wasteful, and ultimately harmful to the real purpose of genealogy: constructing one definitive record of lineage.

By contrast, Geni is building a single world family tree through an approach we call Collaborative Genealogy. Equal parts matching algorithms and social network, only Geni creates a single comprehensive record of human descent via millions of users working together. We do this by wrapping advanced merging and change-management technology within a simple, interactive user interface. We mask deep complexity with a fun website that, quite literally, a grandmother can use [17].

IV. BROKERING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND COMMODITY CULTURE

Geni’s model is a hybrid, drawing upon the collaborative community barn-raising spirit of the early non-profit projects but hosted by a for-profit corporation rather than a nonprofit entity. While some genealogy sites use computers to consolidate user-generated family trees, Geni’s system relies on human judgment and volunteer labor—of those with a vested interest in that information—to carry out these merges, monitor the accuracy, and to produce the product.

This hybridity is a prime characteristic of the Web 2.0 social media environment. Jenkins describes this as „a shift from top-down distribution, very much under the control of commercial interests, toward a more messy, hybrid model of circulation, where greater authority over what spreads shifts into the hands of grassroots communities” [14].

Geni represents an interface between two seemingly opposing models: (a) the corporate for-profit company with a knowledge product created and commodified from the top-down (as in most other genealogy software and web structures) and (b) the open-source, participatory, user-led model for knowledge-building (a wiki model). Wikipedia’s business model is a nonprofit foundation, the aim of which is “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content un-der a free license or in the public domain, and to dissemi-nate it effectively and globally” [18]. Although Geni's leadership aspires to a Wikipedia-type user-participation model, the underlying contradiction is that Geni is in fact a for-profit corporation.

This hybrid between commodity culture and know-ledge culture, and the negotiation between these two models, is a niche that Geni has been working to carve out over the past four years. Geni’s Terms of Service clearly state that Geni does not claim any ownership rights in the information posted to the Geni site : “After posting your Content to the Geni Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose” [19]. However, Geni maintains the right to utilize user-generated content, including the creation of derivative work for commercial purposes.

In discussing Pierre Levy's writing about collective intelligence, Henry Jenkins has noted:

The emergent knowledge cultures never fully escape the influence of the commodity culture any more than commodity culture can function fully outside the constraints of territoriality. However, knowledge cultures, he predicts, will gradually alter the way that commodity cultures or nation states operate.

Nowhere is that transition clearer than within the culture industries, where the commodities that circulate become resources for the production of meaning and where peer-to-peer technologies are being deployed in ways that

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challenge old systems of distribution and ownership. Ultimately, our media future could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and collective intelligence [9].

This is a very profound quote about our changing cultural and media landscape, and the case study of Geni provides a prime example of this very kind of “uneasy truce.”

One of the large issues that has caused tensions and controversies on Geni has been the issue of who “owns“ knowledge and information. The question of intellectual property is actually an issue at several levels, both moral and legal, but most of the controversy on Geni focuses on the discourses of authorship and proprietary rights as individuals, in which some individuals feel very protective and possessive about the genealogical and historical knowledge they have researched and are hesitant to contribute their knowledge to the collective, collaboratively-authored project.

A major challenge for Geni has been how to navigate its own evolution from a service that provided an opportunity to build one's own tree and collaborate with close family members into a site primarily designed to create a shared collaborative family tree project (the Big Tree). Geni has been moving increasingly into an open-source model, though the spectre of the implementation of a full open-source model such as Wikipedia has raised many tensions among Geni users about issues of control and authority over “guarding” correct historical knowledge. Ongoing discussions among the curators become debates about the degree to which well-researched and documented historical data should be left open and vulnerable to being changed, altered or tampered with by less knowledgeable users, who often change profile information based upon less-than-reliable sources.

The most common source of anger, frustration, and conflict on Geni has revolved around the issue of users desiring to maintain a stand-alone tree (a private property model) and not understanding, or rejecting, Geni's evolving move to a site primarily about the creation of a collaborative, jointly managed genealogical database (a communal property model). Many users join Geni with the misconception that it is yet another site allowing them to upload and build and display their family tree online. When their public profiles begin getting merged into the Big Tree, these users often cry in alarm that "their" family trees have been "stolen" or their information "hijacked." On occasion these users rampage through the Big Tree, cutting off branches, detaching parents from children, and otherwise doing what some curators and superusers tend to label as "sabotage" behavior. Although this is occasionally malicious, most often it is a panicked reaction due to the lack of understanding by a new user of the way that Geni functions as well as a reflex reaction to protect one's research from what is perceived as tampering by others.

Geni has realized that some of the problem has been that its promotional and introductory materials have not adequately kept pace with its changing mission, and the curators have urgently asked Geni to make the processes

and policies more transparent to new users with the hopes that doing so will help to diminish these cases in which users feel betrayed by finding out that the system and its services are not what they initially expected.

V. CONCLUSIONS

In summary, this case study has introduced a Web 2.0

company, Geni.com, which has made a valiant attempt to embrace and operationalize the conditions of collaborative knowledge building. Is this truly the democratization of industry? Is it possible for a commercial company to operate like a non-profit open-source site for the public good? This raises a number of important questions. What is Geni's product, in fact? What is Geni truly selling? Is it the technological infrastructure, the collective activity of the users, the content produced by the users, or the opportunity to participate in this collective activity? In the long term, how do the users and curators balance what they (and the public, and future generations) stand to gain from this collective and volunteer enterprise by thousands of active users with what Geni stands to gain in profit from the collective labor of its users and the content generated by its users?

If successful, this end-product will be groundbreaking content unequaled anywhere in the world: a rich compendium of two millennia of historical biographies all interconnected into a kinship structure through the ligaments of family relationships.

The superusers and curators are motivated to be engaged in this project by a passion to contribute to history and posterity, to give back to society and leave a collaboratively-built cultural and historical knowledge base for their children, grandchildren and generations to come. Most have few or no concerns about these larger questions of who profits, since they feel that the work itself will be a testament to their effort.

The case study of Geni provides important insights into what is involved in the distinctive process of developing a system—both technological and human—for creating a collaborative knowledge base that creates a space for building “a family tree of the world.“ This company has focused not on trying to build a preconceived structure but rather to create a system of possibilities and provide tools to the public, then sit back and wait to see what the public wants to do with them, what “social logics and cultural practices” might emerge. Geni as a corporation has been marked by a distinctively personal, hands-on management style, and Geni has enabled a group of user administrators (curators) to help shape the vision and to make technological suggestions, backed by a team of creative and responsive engineers and programmers who work to fulfill the wishes and synergistic visions of the Geni team and its superusers.

The result is an emergent, evolving, dynamic site that is generally responsive to its users. It embodies many of the promises of the Web 2.0 ethos as it creates a space that encourages and empowers a participatory culture of users who are engaged in defining and negotiating a

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“brave new world” of information building, working collectively on a task of knowledge building through historical research, intense interpersonal interaction and collaborative efforts, and advanced technical prowess, to create an integrated repository of knowledge.

Most Geni super-users and curators see their work as a civic duty, as a contribution of their time and effort to the public good, rather than seeing themselves as consumers in this context. Geni’s users are clearly in production mode, though they are also appreciative consumers of the information they collaboratively build. The primary tensions Geni workers are constantly negotiating are those boundaries between public and private information, between what is “mine” and what is “ours.” The sense of proprietary ownership of family knowledge and information is deeply tied to individual and family identity and a sense of privacy, whether that privacy is culturally-mandated or merely culturally influenced.

Geni’s journey of ongoing development of its technological infrastructures and its responsiveness to its users’ emergent practices provides a case study of ways that an international community of users with common interests and a shared purpose can work in partnership with a small corporate team of technical engineers and a handful of customer service representatives to collaboratively design a system that meets the needs and desires of a variety of constituencies.

Despite having a few wrinkles to continue to iron out, Geni appears to be on a trajectory to succeed both as a business and as a site that allows dedicated participation by users who find their own non-monetary rewards. These are the emotional and intellectual rewards that come from the friendships and para-professional relationships made through working in this community as well as through the kinship and extended family connections discovered.

As with any other social networking site, although there is indeed a major task at hand, in the end, Geni for most curators is about the people, and those personal relationships are what drive and motivate the knowledge-building and the collaboration. Engineers, web developers, college professors, accountant, financial planners, librarians, massage therapists, artists, technical writers or real estate agents—each brings to his or her role as a Geni curator a level of commitment and professionalism extraordinary for a volunteer online association.

Working as a curator on a collaborative knowledge-building project is an intense experience, one that can be at times exasperating and even more times extremely rewarding. Geni empowers its users and provides the technologies that enable them to think critically, engage in intensive intellectual inquiry, and actively engage in collaboratively creating a knowledge culture as well as to negotiate and construct an innovative type of utopian community—all while constructing the largest interconnected genealogical database in human history.

The implications of how the lessons from Geni might be applied in an educational environment are profound. A

clear understanding of the promises as well as the challenges of developing online knowledge-building communities may help educators find new ways to engage their students in active and experiential learning, following the conditions set forth in Hmelo-Silver's model [12].

Hmelo-Silver's first condition for CKB, that knowledge problems must arise from attempts to understand the world, can be applied to almost any educational learning outcome. Her second condition, that the goal should be to improve the coherence, quality and utility of ideas, might easily relate to such a learning outcome. Once these conditions have been met, an educator would need to create or adapt an electronically-mediated environment (such as wiki or collaborative writing software) that would provide the tools to allow participants to work collaboratively toward these outcomes.

Hmelo-Silver's third condition—negotiating a 'fit' between the conflicting ideas of different participants and building upon those differences to catalyze knowledge advancement—has been a challenge and learning experience for Geni users, and it is important for a CKB process to not only provide the technology to allow for the public discussion of these differences of opinion and approach but also to allow to allow time for a working system to be negotiated and re-negotiated by the participants. Standards and conventions need to be agreed upon, and as time goes by, sometimes those conventions are altered by the consensus of the group, though the negotiations around this are time-consuming and often contestatory. The educator should build the task of developing standards and conventions into the work plan and realize that the interpersonal skill-building involved in this aspect of the project is an important learning outcome as well.

Hmelo-Silver's fourth condition for CKB, which requires all participants to collectively feel accountable for the collaborative product and to make sure that all participants contribute, is always a challenge. While ensuring collective accountability by all participants is an effort in any group project, the conditions of working together in an online environment make it especially challenging since participants are only 'present' insofar as they are participating; group members can drop out, disappear, or otherwise be silent, and their non-responsiveness is harder to address online than it would be in a face-to-face group activity. This relative anonymity beyond a person's online presence may be more acute in a global voluntary activity such as Geni than in an educational environment, but it is still a significant factor in online group interaction.

In a related way, online collaborative knowledge building interactions reflect many of the same problems with interpersonal communication experienced in other kinds of electronic text-based communication. Lacking the paralanguage cues such as vocal tones or laughter, as well as nonverbal cues such as body language and facial expression, communication based only on exchanges of words typed onto a screen can easily create misunderstandings and lead to interpersonal conflict. A

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substantial amount of tending to relationship maintenance is needed in such interaction, and participation teaches users increased skills in online diplomacy. As with Geni, CKB also requires both trust and risk of the participants: trust in terms of the interdependence and shared accountability as well as trust in facing the emotional risk and vulnerability involved in offering ideas, information, and suggestions into the public space which may be misunderstood, neglected, or criticized. The educator should include a discussion about this process in the preliminary training of participants, though it will need to be reaffirmed at points along the way.

Hmelo-Silver’s fifth condition requires participants to think critically as they use information sources, and this kind of information literacy is an essential critical think-ing skill that can and should be developed in a collabora-tive knowledge building activity. It is closely related to the sixth condition in which, Hmelo-Silver notes, the dis-course of the participants needs to go beyond simple knowledge sharing. This is a crucial point for an educator and one that relies on the principle of group synergy: col-lecting the individual efforts of group members is not adequate. Rather, group participants in CKB must be committed to taking their collective knowledge a step further, using those critical thinking and interpersonal skills to build knowledge—as Hmelo-Silver describes knowledge-building discourse as ‘constructing, refining, and transforming knowledge’ [12].

The development of a sense of community, complete with issues of interpersonal relationship management, self-disclosure, and the balance of trust and risk needed to collectively work together to negotiate and build a new community culture and achieve joint tasks, is a critical process that demands (and develops) intellectual and personal maturity. The degree of teamwork needed to divide labor, specializing as necessary, but also to work together and share ownership of ideas and authorship of products, is high and is a developmental outcome of working on such a project. Working on a global project, moreover, develops a heightened intercultural awareness and a sensitivity to issues related to differences in language and cultures.

Students engaged in collaborative knowledge building therefore learn much more than content alone—the process enriches their interpersonal and intercultural communication skills, enhances their research and organizational skills, and requires a high level of critical thinking. Online collaborative knowledge building, then, may be an ideal project to meet a wide range of learning outcomes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Special thanks to my curator colleagues at Geni, especially Anne Marit Berge, Hatte Blejer, Bjørn Brox, Sharon Doubell, Maria Edmonds-Zediker, Flemming Funch, Erica Howton, Terry Jackson, Malka Mysels, Jadranka Sunde, and Justin Swanström for their spirited collaboration that inspired this work. Gratitude also to Noah Tutak and Michael Stangel for their ongoing

support and assistance with this research. I am indebted to Henry Jenkins for his theoretical inspiration, to Donald Gregory for his critical insights, and I thank Dave and Nolan for their patience and nurture during my long months of intensive research.

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