For the past four years, I've been working on a project that might best be described as a collaborative hypertext. Colorado State University's Online Writing Center has taken on, it might seem, a life of its own. So far, more than 40 faculty, students, and research associates have been a part of the project, many contributing ideas, most contributing texts, and some contributing more time than I care to think about. It's been a time-consuming, exciting, sometimes frustrating, and often exhausting effort.

Needless to say, the opportunity to work on another collaborative hypertext was something I couldn't pass by.

The two projects have given me a basis for thinking about collaborative hypertexts and the role they are likely to play down the road. I suspect that collaborative, evolving hypertexts may have a far more important impact on our field than many of us would now imagine. Consider a journal article that can be updated dynamically as the contributors learn more, read more, or for some other reason reconsider an earlier position. Then think about an article that grows as some contributors drop out of the project and others join.

I'm imagining large scale scholarly documents that incorporate static texts, revisions to early positions, forums that invite readers to contribute and become authors, and real-time discussions that draw on texts, graphics, audio and video to support an ongoing inquiry into an issue. I'm imagining the convergence of hypertext, multimedia, real-time communication, and traditional email/newsgroups/forums. In short, I'm imagining a dynamic scholarly community that blurs the definitions between writers/readers/lurkers in ways that our traditional approaches to scholarly work do not yet seem to allow.

After all, who gets credit for a multi-authored piece when there may be more one hundred "official" authors? And how do we locate ourselves within a text when that text is changing as we read it? And what do we do when an author's position changes as he or she reads something new, elsewhere or within the text itself?

Last year, I tried to think about some of these issues in a post to ACW-L. The topic was tenure and the rewards structure in academe as it pertained to scholarly work within the computers and writing community. Looking back, I suspect that I was beginning to shift my thinking about the role that collaboration can or should play in our professional lives. Please realize that almost all of my publications are co-authored, something that caused a bit of consternation with a few of my senior colleagues. But that collaboration took place well within the traditional structures of academic credit.

What happens when that structure begins to change? And what will the new structure look like? I suspect that our work on this collaborative hypertext is a precursor to what will become a new paradigm for academic work: collaborative communities, facilitated by a wide range of network communication tools, in which positions change and group consensus emerges and in turn is torn apart with what might at times be startling speed.