Traditionally, if someone did some act that required forgiveness, there were social norms in place for such forgiveness to happen. Over time, the act is also typically forgotten. And, should the person not be forgiven and the social pressure become too great, he had the option of moving to a new location for a fresh start. Yet with the Internet, these options are no longer available. Worse, activities which traditionally did not even require forgiveness are now impacting lives in unexpected ways, and are never forgotten. There are, however, technical approaches that could be applied to the problem, such as (1) controlling dissemination through new access control models or cryptographic approaches, (2) flooding the web with contrary information, (3) leading users to believe the information applies to someone else, (4) changing the semantics of what was written, and (5) finding a way to take advantage of the inconvenient information. In this paper we discuss the social act of forgiveness, and go into detail on the possible technical approaches to "forgetting" without deleting.

Small group project work often requires students to meet outside of class. It is important that these meetings be efficacious, as the resulting projects typically figure into students’ grades. The challenge is that, unlike in more formal meetings, there is typically no designated institutional authority to manage their work together. In peer meetings students have equal participatory rights; thus, formulating understandings and managing conflict can be especially delicate matters to accomplish. In this single case analysis of a small group project meeting, we examine the shifting role of a document in resolving conflict that threatens the group’s work. The analysis shows how, over the course of the meeting, a personal document created during the meeting subsequently becomes oriented to by the participants as an official formulation of their decisions and an authoritative directive to complete their tasks. This shift in orientation to the document allows a way out of the conflict and the meeting to come to a successful conclusion. In addition to providing data on conflict resolution in meetings without an official leader, the finding on the changing role of a document adds to understandings of how actions are accomplished through the construction and manipulation of objects.