Libby Hemphill research and posts on social media, collaboration, and related technologies

An alternative to user-generated content

How about indigenous content? "Created by the natives for themselves."  That's the definition offered on Many to Many by Clay Shirky (who credits his friend Kio Stark) and available on NetLingo.  The comments for that blog post offer some other interesting alternatives to "user generated content" such as "lovingly generated content" (instead of amateur, which lots is loving roots in translation).

I've been looking for a way to describe the content users of the SI Wiki contribute, and indigenous might work for now.  I like that indigenous content invokes notions of a physical community, and it is, in part, the physical SI community that makes that wiki different.  It's not a wiki for the world or for some mass of people who don't know one another; it's a wiki for the people, by the people.  Stay tuned for more research on how that wiki works, who uses it, what kinds of information people contribute, and why all that matters.  For a summary of the early work, see our GROUP paper.