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The Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas fora are really taking off now. In response to my post about new forms of organisation the other day, Tim Grey, Vibewire's National Editor, asked for clarification on exactly what I meant by 'institutions'. Here's my reply:

Tim, I think the question about what exactly we mean by 'institutions' is a really good one, too. I do agree that there are many differences between the different institutions you mention (government, NGOs, parties, corporations, etc.), but I think many of them are ideological or procedural rather than fundamental.

To clarify what I mean by institutions - let me start from the definition that my colleague John Hartley and his co-authors offer in their book Key Concepts in Communication (I'm working off the 1989 reprint I used during my undergrad days - it may have changed since then): for them, institutions are

Those enduring regulatory and organising structures of any society, which constrain and control individuals and individuality.

The operative words for our purposes here are 'regulatory' and 'organising' - and the way I would define institutions as I use the term (regardless of whether they're government bodies, parties, or whatever) is that they're structured collections of individuals which are organised and regulated - often quite strictly so.

Another quick rumination in response to the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas discussions. This connects very directly to my research for my latest book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - chapters 5 through 8, on Wikipedia, folksonomies, and related issues around knowledge management and knowledge organisation, all deal in some detail with the question of how to come to an arrangement between 'folks' and 'experts' which both respects expert knowledge and asserts the equipotentiality of contributors who are not certified experts. Here's what I wrote on that point - comments welcome!

It's interesting that the question of experts is coming up here - it's something I've thought a lot about recently, especially also in relation to the Wikipedia where that problem has been a point of ongoing discussion. There are plenty of good arguments in either direction here (let experts have far greater say than average people vs. follow the common-sense consensus of everyone) - personally, my preference would be for a middle way which respects expert knowledge but also doesn't accept it unquestioningly just because someone has a degree and a position of authority.