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Dear Pedro,

While I can respect your motive in wanting to share AACORN with your students, bringing hundreds of people to the table is quite opposite to the intention of AACORN. The ethos of the community has been to grow slowly, and in each case, everyone who joins the community (yourself among us) was introduced by someone who knew the new member personally. Everyone here is part of a community to which she or he has made an artistic or conceptual contribution.

Size will not improve the conversation. One of our problems may be that we grew too big without growing the conversation. At one point we thought we needed to grow. There are lists where critical mass occurs at 600 or 800. Perhaps we need to grow more. Perhaps not. A list can grow so large that people lose the sense of community. The conversation dries up.

As I see it, we have no reason to invite hundreds of students to join the AACORN network. If we all bring all of our students in, we could add 50,000 members overnight. I'd rather see us develop a rich conversation. So far, we have not managed to do so -- adding a hundred or ten thousand voices won't help us to do this.

If you want to share the conversation with an audience of students, you can do so without opening AACORN to hundreds of new members. The AACORN list maintains a public, visible archive at

I hope this does not seem discouraging, but my original question stands: what purpose will a wiki serve for the AACORN community of 230 people who participate now, and not very actively.

Yours,

Ken