This week I had the privilege and pleasure to attend the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute event at the University of North Carolina. It was a great event. I spoke about the Open Library of Humanities, had discussions about XML typesetting, positive representations of Sikhism and social challenges of changing scholarly communications. In short, the diversity and breadth of expertise and participants here made it a brilliant environment. I was sorry I had to leave early.  One point that I made during the event and that we discussed was the connotations of the term “the crowd” and I wanted to write up a few words on why I think the ideologies of this phrase should be subjected to some close reading. The dominant way in which the university and its digital projects tend to think of “the crowd” is primarily as a means of bi-directional engagement. In other words, we need to do public engagement, outreach, become more than an ivory tower that preaches to distant constituents from an elitist site and instead invite contributions in. Many of these elements are key to my thinking on open access, so I certainly don't disagree with that motivation. However, there are two problems and I want to argue them from a devil's advocate perspective. The first lies in the term itself. “The crowd” implies a noisy, uncontrolled “mass”, distinct from the orderly, hierarchical structure of the university that solicits crowd involvement. Sure, we've heard of the “wisdom of the crowd”, but this is perceived as a very different type of wisdom, occurring accidentally and in opposition to the lone, individualist genius, who instead imposes control and discipline to achieve insight. Likewise, we might consider how close synonyms – “swarm”, “the masses”, “quantity” – might have denigrating connotations when applied to others. In other words, while