“Facilitators and participants in these virtual learning spaces are often (not always) dissenters in their f2f context.”

This seems an important point to me. If these facilitators and participants aren’t dissenters in their f2f contexts, they most certainly are outliers and innovators. Even if they’re not dissenting, they’re pushing. Their work in open online spaces models experimentation and risk. Even setting aside the f2f contexts, facilitators and participants in cMOOCs are outliers because of the type of online learning they’re engaged in which run counter to xMOOC approaches and dynamics. These facilitators and participants operate in the margins because they see the margins as ripe with opportunity and possibility.

Your post reminds me that the opportunity and possibility in these people-driven online learning spaces is really rooted in the equity potential of these spaces. In any given online space, issues of status or “celebrity” threaten that potential. Here’s hoping that questions like the one George Siemens asked and the ones you’re raising here become fixtures in the learning design of online opportunities. When we participate or facilitate in the margins, it is our job to leave the margins better, and more inclusive than we found them. In that way, we might beautify and expand these margins.