"The article argues for a historical perspective on mobility and learning. In social production or peer production, mobility takes the shape of expansive swarming, sideways transitions and boundary-crossing. The notion of wildfire activities is proposed to point out that activities such as birding, skateboarding, and disaster relief of the Red Cross have characteristics similar to those of peer production but predate internet and take place mainly outside the sphere of digital virtuality. Wildfire activities pop up in unexpected locations at unexpected times and expand very rapidly. They become extinguished from time to time, yet they reappear and flare up again. Learning in wildfire activities is learning by swarming that crosses boundaries and ties knots between actors. It is also learning by building mycorrhizae communities by means of cognitive trails and social bonds that make the terrains knowable and livable. The mechanism of stigmergy is foundational in mycorrhizae communities."

"First, actors engaged in social production are in it to achieve and produce something, they are oriented toward an object. They do not look like the idle wanderer implied by Ingold’s account. Their object is open-ended and unpredictable, but it has tremendous drawing power and motivational force (Knorr-Cetina, 1997). Secondly, the swarming movement of peer production is foundationally collective, in contrast to the image of an individual walker evoked by Ingold’s account. Thirdly, the new patterns of social production do not take shape in pure forms. They hybridize and seek symbioses with the vertical and linear structures of mass production (e.g., Siltala, Freeman & Miettinen, 2007). It is these hybrid and symbiotic forms that promise to open up historically new possibilities."

• Can a group be aligned and effective? One interpretation of that is to think of it as a question with an obvious answer: Yes, while recognizing that a group could be aligned and still not effective. The comments above suggest ways of achieving alignment: an attractor basin (Engeström's "object", a game's quest), coupled with game mechanics (role playing, guild leadership, rules of engagement).

• (How) Can a group be non-aligned and effective? It strikes me that Sam's comments under that bullet appear to seek means of alignment; I would argue that role-playing engagement with game mechanics and goals serve that purpose. After all, guild leadership and player performance metrics create a Darwinian environment which promotes effective groups. I'm not sure that's even remotely a useful response to the bullet, though it represents one model of how game mechanics contributes to effective groups.