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Collaboration
While the website relates to a specific published work (CAR), it is meant to serve a broader purpose, which is that of confronting more broadly issues raised and discussed in the book, whether they are parallel or integral to it. As a result, I have sought the collaboration of colleagues, young scholars and students. Since it is planned that the website remain open in the foreseeable future, I am counting on this collaboration to continue and to expand, so as to ensure the widest possible reach for the website itself. Details of the Critique Collaboration Group will be further and more formally worked out when this effort will effectively start.
To this end, a memorandum of understanding is established individually with each collaborator. This identifies the range of interests, so as to safeguard the degree of collaborator's involvement.
It is conceivable that two individuals may approach the same topic. The memorandum makes the idividuals concerned aware of this, so that there may a concerted action. This helps to avoid needless overlaps, while favoring, where desirable, multiple points of view being expressed regarding the same topic.
This process is concretely coordinated by the website editor.
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Authorship
Websites do not often give as much recognition to authorship as printed materials do. Here I give instead much attention to the identification of each collaborator and to the specifics of the tasks undertaken. There are three main reasons for such explicitness in identifying authorship.
(1) Attribution. The more apparent reason is to ensure appropriate credit for the work actually done. Instead of a generic mention in an introductory statement, each task is specifically attributed to its author.
(2) Responsibility. The notion of "publishing" entails awareness of how one's facts and ideas are exposed to public scrutiny. Explicit identification gives the author a heightened sense of commitment to what is being so "published."
(3) Calibration. The reader's awareness of who has written any given entry makes it possible to assess the limits of the entry itself, e. g., to calibrate its worth. This is further qualified by the date that accompanies most entries.
For details on individual collaborators see the separate section on Authorship.
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Authority
These considerations speak to the significance of a concept that is in disuse, namely that of authority. The objection to an eccessive reliance on it is certainly valid if it refers to an uncritical and blind acceptance of what somebody says only because of who this person is. But such freedom from "authority" is often illusory. In point of fact one inevitably establishes one's own parameters by which a given weight is assigned to an entry; these parameters are then unconsciously accepted as founding an implicit validity of the source where the entry is found. This happens all the more and all the more frequently with information and opinions derived from the web, particularly (and ironically) when the source is anonymous.
The stress I lay on transparent authorship helps in making explicit these parameters and thus in clarifying to what extent one is, in fact, dependent on the "authority" of the writer. For these reasons, I favor the use of the first person in the entries, something that is not common in the often anonymous style of websites.
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