The social values of software

At the PROWE meeting yesterday I was once again struck by the social values that are associated with different pieces of software. The project is looking at wikis as a tool for tutor support and also personal repositories/e-portfolio. They have selected ELGG as it seems to straddle both of these camps. While that is true technically, there are process issues that reflect the different values of these two approaches. This was brought in to focus when we started discussing lurkers. Some members wanted to discourage lurking. I was coming from a wiki mindset and thought this strange - after all most of us are 'lurkers' on wikipedia. But viewed from an eportfolio perspective it makes sense, since there you select who you wish to share your portfolio with and you may not want access to your personal repository to be completely open.