hem|mungen

Too bad she doesn't seem to feel much of a sense of responsibility towards her readers. There's no reason that this community should dissolve just because she's not going to post anymore. Can people be directed to some other more permanent outlet for these discussions?

Andrew, that's a callous and stupid thing to say. When someone is going through a wrenching change, maintaining a blog for which there's no remuneration is a rather low priority; and stopping is not evidence of a lack of a sense of responsibility. Furthermore, it's not as if IA is some kind of neutral locus around which "this community" happens to have coalesced: it is what it is because she is who she is: an extraordinarily smart, thoughtful, and witty person. If you'd like to make a permanent home for the community, then start a blog, post a comment at IA's directing people there, and see how it goes.

Since it does sound callous, I feel like I should contextualize Andrew's comment: he isn't a regular reader of IA and as a result approaches the blog as an observer--often filtered through me. When I speak of it, I always stress the community aspect of the blog, and he as a result has understood it as more of a group space than as the personal project that it began and, ultimately, ends as.
Because of her talent at mediating and her sensible approach to the issues she raised, IA's blog took on a life of its own, growing perhaps beyond the initiator's original intent. But given the specific circumstances of IA, I wouldn't say that she has a responsibility to us. IA's decision to quit is her own, and 'our' needs have very little to seek here. We just have to regroup.
I think what Andrew was getting at is a larger and stickier question that is more suited to intentional internet communities, say like CT, but not to the accidental sort that grow up around something, like IA. Are there cases in which the moderator or originator (I'm trying not to say 'author') has some kind of responsibility to the audience (or are they also authors, who have their own agency)?
I'm not expressing this right, but it seems like this is a discussion that must have come up before in the context of internet communities.

Is Invisible Adjunt a "public place" in any sense? If so, does the community at large have any rights to it that extend beyond one person's nominal stewardship of it? If it's not public, then what's the value of the information and relationships that have developed there?

Thanks for the clarification Heather.

Andrew, of course it's public in the sense that it's available to anyone with internet access. But IA's relationship to the blog isn't "nominal stewardship," it's ownership. It's her site in every sense: she chooses the look, sets the agenda, writes the primary content, and pays for the pages to be hosted.

Long-time readers of the site have surely noticed that even when IA posts and announces that she'll be away, the frequency of comments decreases substantially. We are there because she's there. The community, such as it is, is akin to a salon, with IA as hostess. No one is obligated to have people over, no matter how much those people enjoy it, and the suggestion that IA is somehow failing us--especially when the end of the blog is clearly bound up with the academy's failure to recognize her gifts--strike me, again, as callous.

I like the comparison to a salon.
Any discussion of the 'space' of IA as a blog or a forum takes on a different tenor given the personal nature of the site, not just one person's ownership of it but the fact that it grew out of IA's relationship to her career, and more pointedly, out of her disappointment in the structures in which she was trying to act.

"...it grew out of IA's relationship to her career..."

Right! Well put.