Some of us are looking into literature that studies volunteers, in particular, what types of factors motivate people to join and to continue participating in volunteer activities. From this perspective, the following NY Times article was quite interesting: "My Network, My Cause". It reports on how some students have used Facebook to organize "traditional" volunteering activities - here, getting donations for the people of Darfur - using a new technology. Personally, I'm more interested in how what's known about "offline" volunteering can inform the design of online volounteer-based communities, but this still is quite intriguing.

There's an interesting new read on collaborative software for US intelligence agencies on the NY times website. The author claims that agencies are way late on getting on the member-maintained bandwagon.

Sounds like the intelligence community is a very different world than the uber-high-tech community depicted by Hollywood in movies like Enemy of the State.