What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Lectures#
One lecture a week, each one setting up the Shift it shares a date with. They run to the same arc the course does: three weeks learning to be a newcomer, three learning to be a contributor, three learning to hold the mop, and three on what happens when you put it down.
Two weeks carry slides: week 1, which is the case for the course existing, and week 10, which is the week it argues hardest. The rest carry the argument in prose, because the work is in the Shift.
Who mops
The opening lecture — the size of the volunteer workforce that maintains the internet's reference layer, and why no institution has ever tried to train it
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Lurking as method
Every community runs on rules that are written down and rules that are not, and the gap between them is where newcomers are lost
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Be bold
The mechanics of a first contribution, the standard of evidence behind it, and the instruction Wikipedia has given newcomers since its second day
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Reverted
Your work has been undone by a stranger with no obligation to explain themselves — what happens next is the skill the course is really teaching
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Provenance
Two volunteer projects, two incompatible theories of what makes a claim admissible, and what happens when a contributor moves between them
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Who gets to exist
Deletion is the most consequential decision a volunteer community makes, and it is made by whoever turned up to the discussion
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Taking the mop
The transition from contributor to moderator, and the first thing every new mod team discovers about writing down its own rules
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
A removal is a message
Enforcement as writing — the removal reason, the ban notice and the appeal, and what each one costs the person receiving it
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
The queue at 2am
What the work does to the people who do it, why mod teams collapse in predictable ways, and how a rota is a piece of moral engineering
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Exit, voice and the fork
When a volunteer community and its host disagree, the leverage volunteers hold is the work itself — and withdrawing it is the hardest call in the craft
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
Machines in the queue
Automated contribution, automated moderation, and generated text arriving faster than volunteers can assess it
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
Handover
The last skill, and the one almost nobody practises — leaving a volunteer role without taking the institution's memory with you
Week 12 · 24 May 2027