One such "virtual commons" discussed last year at Kalamazoo and the year before at Pisa was the one that a large international medieval historical education group, the Society for Creative Anachronism, was establishing for group discussion of medieval anthroponymy, toponymy, and heraldry, focussing on individual names and naming practices, especially in areas of cross-cultural contact, and on specific coats of arms. It is expected to be up and running by this fall; it's still in beta at present. Scott Catledge

At Kalamazoo last year, I heard a discussion of a project that was planning to use an virtual commons--i.e. a place where users could contribute to the development of the project through shared annotation, textual development, and the like (I think they actually described it as a piazza. As I understood the idea, and in discussion at the Digital Medievalist business meeting a couple of people mentioned similar proposal, the idea was to build what we might now think of as adding wiki-like capabilities to a larger, unified, scholarly project.

Does anybody know of any scholarly projects that have actually implemented such virtual piazza-type interaction? I'm interested in projects that allows arbitrary users to contribute to the content, either with or without refereeing.

-d