To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

This manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate <em>key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context</em>. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four <em>topoi</em> that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned <em>topos</em>: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their <em>topos</em>. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto.

Protein folding is an important area of research in bioinformatics and molecular biology. The process and product of protein folding concerns how proteins achieve their functional state. A particularly difficult area of protein folding is protein structure prediction. There are many possible ways a protein can fold, and this makes prediction difficult, even with the aid of computational approaches. Protein folding prediction requires significant human attention. Foldit, an online science game, provides an innovative approach to the problem by enlisting human beings to solve puzzles that correlate with protein folding possibilities. Such work aligns broadly with emerging trends in citizen science, where non-experts are enlisted for productive alliances. We examine Foldit, commonly looked at as a dynamic community, and suggest such communities actually have potential to be relatively static and to reproduce and maintain a set of power relations. We make this argument by combining perspectives from Rhetorical Genre Studies and Actor-Network Theory.