Community Networks and Websites? 155
brendano writes "I've been doing some research into the fascinating world of community networks and websites -- online places that can inform and connect
people of a real-life community. They typically provide news, discussion
forums, and email for local residents. There are some quite successful ones
(such as the nonprofit Seattle Community Network
or the Blacksburg Electronic Village), but also
also ghost town-like failures that
show how hard it is to get a community network/website rolling. In addition,
many struggle with questions of how to get funding; whether they can be for-profit while serving the community, or be
non-profit with enough money to keep going. Unlike the
wireless community networks we hear about so much, these
types of community networks go beyond just internet access and try to provide
access to the community itself. Some, even, are being done to help build
up disenfranchised communities, such as one in a housing project, or the
three of HP's Digital Village project (one of whose projects I'm researching for.) I was wondering if members of the Slashdot community know of more examples of community networks, and what people
think of these projects. Can real-life communities succeed in the online
environment as well? How so?"
The only place where I could find normal people (Score:1)
A pity... the problem is not to create good website, the problem is to make it visited by locals...
Town of arlington, ma (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Town of arlington, ma (Score:2, Informative)
Check out the 800 person forum in Minneapolis http://e-democracy.org/mpls , the 300 person forum in St. Paul http://e-democracy.org/stpaul , and 250 person forum in the small city of Winona, Minnesota http://onlinedemocracy.winona.org
Related articles:
A Wired Agora - Minneapolis the Internet, Citizen Participation and Squirrels - http://www.publicus.net/present/agora.html
Winona Online Democracy Startup
http://onlinedemocracy.winona.org/startu
Re:Town of arlington, ma (Score:2, Interesting)
Great question.
The world is run by those who show up. In Minneapolis 13 council members represent 380,000 people. We have 800 active citizens including many of the council members, local journalists and hundreds of people active in their neighborhoods. Our goal is to open up community discussions - put an online forum in the middle of real politics to make it more accessible and transparent. What is better, 13 council members with little city-wide press coverage in a metro-media market only or an open forum that allows anyone with good ideas to see their opinions spread and perhaps help set/influence the agenda?
More information including links to articles in the local paper about the forum [mail-archive.com].
Cheers, Steven Clift
not in my lifetime (Score:1)
Real life is good sometimes people. I know...you gotta deal with other people but if you're to the point were you but black paint under your eyes to reduce monitor glare (no kidding I've done this in a personal 48 hour gaming marathon), it's time to take a walk.
Re:not in my lifetime (Score:3, Interesting)
Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) (Score:1)
Attract visitors by allowing free buy/sell (Score:2, Interesting)
I suspect a lot of people in a geographic area would have something to buy/sell (cars, collectibles, appliances, computers, etc.) Advertise free buy/sell classifieds. They will come. And then introduce forums, chat, community calendar, and all that stuff.
Re:Attract visitors by allowing free buy/sell (Score:1)
WhitleyNet (Score:3, Interesting)
I was part of a really good one.. (Score:3, Interesting)
On a side note, it is interesting how people hold grudges and such, even on an online community. Still, on my online journal, and when I comment on friends, people that had nothing better to do in our chat room then insult me still do it, even after being gone for over two months now.
Re:I was part of a really good one.. (Score:4, Funny)
Sure they can. (Score:4, Interesting)
As of right now I am posting this through community DSL. Granted, it is for profit and more pricey than Bellsouth, but I've had negligable downtime (only twice, once due to a server upgrade on their end and once when their pipe got broke). When I call them up with a problem (like getting a static public address), I talk to as person. There is no machine that picks up and asks you to hold for fifteen minutes with confusing options. The people are generally helpful and their service is impeccable. And if you're wondering if they are a community provider, website [gnat.net].
Online Messaging (Score:1)
While smaller boards allow for more of a targeted group, or individuals that are all interested or involved in a specific action or activity
It is hard to say which is better, for they both have there pros and cons, but if you like to argue about broad topics,
My $0.02
Medevo
Communities of region (Score:1)
The common problem I have found is that the traditional media product failed to solidify a community itself, which inherently lead to difficulties reaching a critical mass in an online community.
As well, the community online needs to be able to solidify itself in various facets in order for it to be successful. For instance forming a community around Athens, GA wouldn't work as well as forming a community around Athens, GA and then a subcommunity in it based around the music scene.
So, in my experience, solidifying an online community around a regional media presense, or even a region is difficult. What I think would be more successful, and what is going to be my next project is forming the online community around national matters of interest (linked in with the national parent media company), and segmenting subcommunities based on regional interest, offering a kind of hybrid of regional/national topics.
Re:Communities of region (Score:2, Insightful)
Trust me.... Literacy and marketing do not mix well.
Tallahassee Florida (Score:1, Interesting)
20K users, free dialup, community forums, etc. They sell used donated equipment from time to time, and have had library grant money in the past. Initially set up by Florida State University [fsu.edu]. Tallahassee Freenet [tfn.net]
How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the community has a lot of younger professionals, maybe it works. But if there are a lot of older retirees, maybe it doesn't.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
Re:How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:1)
Curse that law of unintended consequences.
Re:How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:1)
Re:How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:2)
Re:How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:1)
Re:How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:1)
Re:How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:1)
I think that you would be surprised how many older people really enjoy discussion boards and such. Once they get used to the idea, many people love 'em. I wish I could remember the site, but in Portland Oregon they have some sort of community forum that is dominated by older folks (meaning retired or semi-retired).
Some searching...here it is [portlandstories.org]. Not a traditional forum, but the idea is similar.
Re:How much of *community* cares about a web-site? (Score:2, Interesting)
It is all about outreach. With E-Democracy [e-democracy.org] we host local community discussions that have a tremendously diverse amount of expression. We don't know who our 800 participants are compared to say the census, but we know that 800 people in any geographic community discussing local issues [mail-archive.com] is very important and empowering. Take a look and judge for yourself.
In terms of gender, age, neighborhood, ethnicity, income, etc. we can alway have more diversity and we are actually working on some grant proposals to hit various community events in-person to recruit for our forums. However, these community forums really only matter to various communities when they themselves think they matter. Right now the "active citizens" of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Winona understand the real world political agenda setting power of online discussions where community leaders/the media participate/lurk, while many of diverse and newer immigrant communities haven't caught on yet. They will as they come to use all forms of media and communication to increase their power in the community ... or they won't if it doesn't appeal to them or relate in someway to their everyday life.
Steven Clift [publicus.net]
Community Website I've run / been involved with. (Score:5, Insightful)
We then started a community website for Indian's in Hong Kong on hkindians.com [hkindians.com] and this has also been sucessful... even though we don't spend a cent on advertising, these community websites are very viral. People in the community (depending on how targetted your definition of community is) will talk about it and will spread the word. It is then up to you to make the money.
Here's my take on what it takes...
a) Building a community takes a lot of hard work. You genuinely have to be interested in networking with the people and getting to know people. You have to be prepared to answer tons of questions and deal with a lot of trivial (to you as a webmaster) issues. It is not easy.
b) Once you've got a few hundred people rolling, take some time and figure out what they purchase, who are the people who want to target them and try to bring the two together. On HKIndians.Com we are working currently with a couple of local insurance providers and a long distance call broker. We have had sponsorships from local cable companies who want to target new channels to the Indian community. There is money to be made.. just not dot-com millions. Don't give up your day job.
c) This is very important... don't loose your passion for the community. Once you do.. others will sense your disinterest and loose their interest.. this will happen very quickly.
On well
Re:Community Website I've run / been involved with (Score:1)
Is there anything wrong in making money on a community venture? The freebie newspapers have been making money based around microcommunities / free publishing / providing a service by infact doing what I have said...
They viral market, by publishing content which people are interested in and talk about. They target by providing content which is very specific to their audience and required by their audience.
The comment about being reduced to using affiliate programs was more of a statement on the downturn in the ad markets. We have fixed the problems by going out and actively seeking advertisers who need to get their products out in front of the people who visit the site.
While I am at it ... could you define selling out? Oh yeah .. probably means making some money out of your cause. Bleah...
one day... (Score:1)
A Community destroyed by it's creators... (Score:1, Interesting)
Freenets (Score:1, Insightful)
They offer access, local newsgroups (SIGs), internet access, etc.. etc.. etc...
At one time there were almost a hundred Freenets around, but only a handful are left. They offered internet access (gopher, telnet, newsgroups, IRC) even before the Internet was commercialized. For many, Freenets was the first taste of the Internet (myself included).
Re:Freenets (Score:1)
I work for a freenet that's been around for quite a while. It's the Eugene Free Network [efn.org] and it started off back in '92-'93 as basically a single box under the stairs at clif's house. Nowadays we serve approximately 16,000 members.
A few years ago, (before I joined) the IRS came in and gave the organization a bunch of grief for providing internet access as a non-profit, basically their stand was that since EFN was providing a service (internet access) it was competing with other businesses and could not qualify as a non-profit organization regardless of whether it was a money-making operation or not. The end result was that we ended up with two organizations OPN (Oregon Public Networking) which is a 501c3 charitable organization which owns EFN (Eugene Free Community Network) which is a not-for-profit business.
OPN is involved in a variety of efforts that would interest the more public-spirited slashdot members, including internet access for the blind and disabled; hosting the local LUG [euglug.org] and most recently an ongoing effort to encourage the local school districts to adopt the LTSP.
If you're ever in Eugene, come check us out 43 w. Broadway
CMU web community (Score:2, Informative)
Unlike standard file sharing networks, your identity (by way of your university e-mail address) is clearly tied with your content, so the theory :-) is that should discourage blatant piracy and encourage sharing of "commnity oriented" content. Unfortunately we launched it right before summer break so users are slow in coming, but we hope interesting things (other than rampant piracy :) will happen...
IMO this is a much better example of "community web" since each user has as much control as any other member of the community as to what content is published. Of course this is also rather anarchistic, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Give 'em good tools and they'll build it themselve (Score:4, Interesting)
I basically do all the tech work (Sybase ASE, PHP, Linux, etc.) but am also vitally interested in keeping the user-base happy with high-performance and reliability combined with ease-of-use. The problem has been integrating casual members of different real-live groups (e.g. Red Wings sports fans interacting with PGA Golf fans) while still catering to the hard-core fan.
We've taken to limiting almost all off-topic posts to specific forums (called the 'BBQ's) while keeping on-topic posts in the team-related forums. Typically the 'word association' and 'what are you wearing' type threads are relegated solely to the BBQ. Users who want to get their Pedro Martinez fix can do so without wading through 100 pages of 'What is your favorite food' threads. This allows both the hard-core and casual fan user groups to coexist but also via the BBQs we can also get different fans (Football and Hockey for instance) to begin to know each other.
Another often-ignored section is usability. As has been said countless times before - usability is king. As we all know from Windows vs. Linux etc. the mass market is generally quite computer-illiterate when it comes to anything more complex than double vs. single clicking on icons (sometimes even that is too complex!!). Slashdot for the masses? Sheesh, if you look in the prefs section there are a billion different things to click on, some of which have scary names like 'threshold', 'display mode', and 'thread'. Sure, for Slash's audience this makes perfect sense, but for mass-appeal you have to really, really dumb things down. Keep that in mind when developing - as the 'elite' we work with computers very often. Mom-n-Pop (who probably have a larger disposable income than most college computer-savvy types) need to be able to maneuver and feel comfortable in your site. Why is AOL so freakin popular? You don't have to worry about DUN, TCP/IP settings, or even trying to figure out what browser you are using! All you have to do is click "Connect to the internet" and you're there!
Don't also forget that usability doesn't necessarily mean 'high-tech'. The user doesn't necessarily need to have 30 widgets available to them on the front page, but us geeks really like to poke with settings. Make the 'default' interface nice and clean. If it limits some of the 'cooler' options then so be it. Let the geeks check the box called 'power user'.
Keep it fast - they say that most users have a 3 second (or thereabouts) tolerance for page lag. Most I've noticed are quite lower than that - if it doesn't start loading by the time IE makes that little 'click' sound they're somewhere else.
And last of all -- make sure it is 'boss friendly'. People that need to browse covertly at work have a much easier time if you use few 'neon' colors and pop ups!
Re:Give 'em good tools and they'll build it themse (Score:1)
I have been involved with communities that started out of MUSHes and later evolved into off-line communities, and vice versa.
Perfect Timing (Score:3, Interesting)
I've just recently started working on a community website for my local community. We're not a large group of people and fairly rural as far as that goes. But we are growing fast (in the top 3 fastest growing counties in Missouri, USA) and a lot of "computer-friendly" families are moving here from the city. My web design business is starting to pick up as they do as well.
I've started to do a lot of research on the 'net, looking at other community sites and reading articles on the subject. I haven't found too much to help me, however. The Seattle website that you mentioned was one of the best organized that I found. I think, for-profit or not-for-profit, that a community site could work if advertised, well monitored, updated regularly, and information posted that was relevant to the community. You might even find people logging into the site that normally don't spend any/much time on the Internet.
With that said, I am still looking for help myself. You can be sure I will be reading through every post on this subject over the next couple of days. If anyone knows of sucessful sites or websites that offer points to consider, I would appreciate the info...either in reply on
Re:Perfect Timing (Score:1)
Community technology center web sites/locations (Score:2, Informative)
design factors (Score:2)
Not all things are intuitive. For example, NeighborSpace.org, cited above as a ghostown, is a pretty site, but Seattle Community Network, a successful one, is fairly simple and plain.
The approaches are quite different, but SCN seems to be providing a resource that is useful, while NeighborSpace seems to be more focused in getting me to contribute something first. If I lived in Seatlle, I would probably use the SCN local directories, at least for a while. Just looking at it, it is useful to me, streamlined, right to the point.
Oaxaca.com (Score:1)
It has about 1659 registered users.
URL: http://oaxaca.com [oaxaca.com]
Real Online Communities (Score:1)
heh (Score:2)
I just finished this project a few weeks ago for my Information Technology 12 class. It was a half-ass job, but I got a really good mark for it seeing that others didn't go as far as I did.
I am QUITE aware of the holes in my project.
Rural Portals (Score:1)
The 'portal' in question is HumGuide (http://www.humguide.com/).
Re:Rural Portals (Score:1)
on another note, if you put a ".com" after our city name, you get links to porn sites. i wonder why someone bothered to buy the name of our town... there's no money here to buy it back from them.
NWTekno.org (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Matching the site to the community (Score:1)
Things we have found to be useful include:
- Getting local 'heros' to represent/communicate the values of our community
- Putting equal effort into 'physical' and 'virtual' activities of our community
- Getting our members to pay once per year and post their own material
- Using situations vacant as a way to drive up traffic and a value argument (we are a lot cheaper than newsprint media)
Things which did not go so well include:
- Assuming that people would renew membership automatically once they got an e-mail
- Trying to touch members outside our catchment area for meetings [50kms]
- Chat / bulletin boards
Our thoughts for the future include:
- Moving the whole process to pocket devices
- Being proactive - triggering the right people with e-mails/sms
- Linking up with other communities
We Have a Very Successful Community Network (Score:3, Informative)
Among the community services that are funded by this are providing free internet access in libraries, schools and senior centers, which would otherwise not be available in typical rural communities, providing free web space for other local non-profit organizations, providing local real-time election results, refurbishing donated PCs for use by other non-profits, and providing links to local businesses.
Our community network has been very successful. Because of being non-profit, they can offer competitive internet access rates and high quality local service. They have attracted many local users who have migrated over from larger ISPs such as Earthlink as their rates have gone up and their service has gone down. Selling low cost internet access as a non-profit and providing good service seems to be a good way to fund a community network, at least it has worked for us.
The best I've ever seen. (Score:1)
They focus on building community, rather than specific content goals.
It can be done... (Score:2)
I'd give a URL, but the server's struggling as it is, and a little
Why not? It's a great use of the web. The trick is certainly getting people using it, but just let people know about it, and if they like it, they'll tell their friends, who will tell their friends, etc. Internet popularity is as much viral as anything - you just have to plant the seed.
Online Communities. (Score:1)
They are mostly teenagers but a few older folks also participate. There are also websites for the channel which say where the parties and events in the area are happening and pictures of those parties.
Its amazing how many people i meet in "real life" that also chat on the channel.
Quite a few slashdot readers are there too
The Well (Score:1)
My Small Community Server (Score:1)
It's great -- we have forums, a web based instant messaging system, web mail, file archives, and a handful of domains for people's personal sites. It's really helped us stay in touch.
As far as funding goes, everyone chips in. The server is hosted at Rackspace, and between all the people involved it costs about $6 per month each, which is really affordable, even for us student types.
It's a very successful system, in my opinion. If anyone's curious about my experiences setting it up, or has any questions, send me an e-mail.
community networking, over time (Score:1)
One of the difficulties with getting a successful community network off the ground is the amount of buy-in that you could get from the general population. Many projects were started by early technology adopters who "knew" that widespread capacity and the early development of resouces would benefit the community, but if a broad base of support did not come together then it would be difficult for those individuals to sustain. I co-authored an early study [uiuc.edu] of the expression of community networks through the web and directed a community-funded project as well, Aurora Online [aurora.il.us].
While we had buy-in from community leaders and early adopters, the rate of technology adoption by "real people" was always too slow to help us build critical mass outside of certain key segments (education, government, but not business in this manufacturing town). Involvement at the state level [icnweb.org] pretty much mirrored this: the community network initiatives that did well did so in communities with either a rapid rate of adoption (pure numbers) or a broad adoption pattern (depth).
As the term "community" has come to have a broader application I think that the same observations apply. Fan sites, communities of interest, &c. generally do not do well if they are imposed top-down by a few individuals, but can thrive if they allow the broader base of potential participants to express themselves through the medium, while also feeling that they are served/informed or that they otherwise learn of grow via participation and contribution. Anyway, if you want to follow up with Seattle and all of the things that they did right then take a look at Douglas Schuler [scn.org], particularly his book on community networking. There is a lot of good history out there, starting with the FreeNet movement and NPTN, and you can get a good idea of how technology has changed over the years as CN issues have moved from access to hardware, to access to bandwidth and email (I am retiring the free email accounts on AOCN this summer, it was a big deal to offer them in the pre-hotmail days), to community technology centers and job training. Glad to see this get a thread.
--chris
Square Bob Sponge Pants (Score:2)
Re:Square Bob Sponge Pants (Score:1)
BEV (Score:1)
The first reason is that Blacksburg as a whole supports this online community. The whole town is devoted to improving local connections and online information.
The second reason is the support received from Virginia Tech. We have several research oppurtunities related to BEV, and have played a large roll in deveoping and improving this community continuously.
From this it seems large-scale community involvement and university support help promote a healthy electronic community.
Re:BEV (Score:1)
Would I do it again? (Score:2)
City Stories (Score:2)
Ghost town-like failures (Score:2)
All you need... (Score:1)
...is a copy of phpRated [phprated.com].
Palo Alto Freenet (Score:1)
paul
kd4idr
palo alto, ca
Foo - Slash software sucks! (Score:2)
I'd say that thus far such communities most naturally grow around subjects of global interest (such as photo.net [photo.net]), which spawned the codebase that grew to be OpenACS.
But I wouldn't give up on communities of more narrow interest. After all, in wetware space frequently membership to meetings is depressingly low. Yet
Re:Foo - Slash software sucks! (Score:1)
wow, very interesting (Score:1)
MAGE [kicks-ass.net]
I'd definitely be interested in hearing what types of features and functions people who are interested in doing this type of thing would find useful.
Though my site has no specific Geographic limitations, the vast majority of it's users are from Michigan and Louisiana. I find it really quite difficult to get most 'net users into message boards, and such.. but perhaps I just don't have the right layout/format.
I'm open to all ideas, and I'd love to contribute work to a project, if there's anyone out there that's thinking of doing something like this.
Let the community evolve its online resources (Score:2)
That's why the model of an individual creating a geographic community's website doesn't work so well. Instead what you need is a place on line where individual community members can create their own resources. They get involvement at a level they're interested in, you get volunteer labor and a diversity of ideas that couldn't exist otherwise.
Derek Powazek wrote the book (Score:2)
I highly recommend it. It goes to the broad level of creating relevant communities, how to make sure they're useful, and also discusses the nuts and bolts of registrations and logins. It even has the pragmatism to devote a chapter on how to close communities down when they no longer serve a needed function, without leaving people in the lurch.
This really is a great book.
The BBC - A Sense of Place (Score:1)
The BBC is trying this idea out in the UK with three new websites:
They're set up to have articles on various aspects of local life... to allow people to create pages about whatever they want... and with forums for discussion on each page. However, there don't seem to be too many people there yet!
I guess it's mostly a case of good publicity and luck...
Current community network research (Score:1)
I was wondering if members of the Slashdot community know of more examples of community networks...
Telstra Research Labs did a little bit of an information session/recruitment drive at my university a few weeks ago. One of the things they said they were working on was a community network in Launceston [telstra.com.au]. Sounds like the kind of thing you're talking about. There's a link to the community's page [elaunceston.com] but nothing about the results of the research as yet. Not that I could see anyway.
Re: List of community networks (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.afcn.org/
An Atlantic Canada Community Net (Score:1)
I volunteer as an online help guy for our local community net, Chebucto Community Net [chebucto.ns.ca], which is based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. As you can see from the About Us [chebucto.ns.ca] link the community net here has been around since 1993; that page is also a reasonable summary of what the operation is all about.
I have participated in some policy workshops, and although I am by no means a primary volunteer (too much other stuff to do) I can certainly assert that community nets like this are the only source of connectivity for low-income folks, are one of the few affordable sources of connectivity for many other community organizations, and are also frequently the only ISPs that seem to give a damn about accessibility.
Although I use cable myself (now) I still maintain a dialup account through CCN. It is interesting to note that they provide a full-featured PPP experience at a theoretical 56K for only CAN $100 per year. Contrast that to any other ISP locally, where your annual costs will be at least quadruple that.
They offer a reliable connection and the responsivity to help requests is good. What more can you ask for?
ISU Community Network (Score:1)
What about Wikis? :-) (sites one can participe) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about Wikis? :-) (sites one can participe (Score:1)
http://www.richmondfreewireless.org [richmondfreewireless.org]
The only ones I know of (Score:1)
Traditional meaning the users are online together for a period of time, not just posting messages or web pages in a collective area.
The first one would be online action fps shooters like Quake Arena, Unreal, etc. These are where players want to compete for a few rounds and focus on a task.
The second one would be online role playing games like Everquest, AO, DaoC, etc. Here players are visiting the dungeons with the good experience or loot in their quest to get maximum levels and loot (could take thousands of hours). Ultima Online could be in this category but the game had a mass exodus. It's too easy to get the maximum attainable skills (a month or less) and instant teleporting to anywhere. Kind of like winning a Warcraft level.. nothing to do afterwards.
Online communities only seem to work when the people have a common task. Otherwise it becomes a chat room.. which some enjoy but i'm an action person.
Ned (Score:1)
Emory University (Score:1)
Embryonic Community Website... (Score:1)
We're such a small, spread-out community, I set up a site www.nzpagans.com [nzpagans.com] to let people know about the various groups, shops, websites etc there for us. There is a more well known international site, www.witchvox.com [witchvox.com], but many people think it's only for Witches and Wiccans, and besides, it's good to have a more locally orientated site.
Problems with the site:
1. I'm doing it manually. I'm a moron. I'm gonna set up everything using PHP, mySQL etc eventually (soon? I've just been lazy...) because one of the points of a community site, is that the info is contributed by the community, and I'm not making it that easy.
2. Because I'm doing it all myself, and manually, it only gets updated every month or so. This is a major problem, as people tend to only regularly visit sites that change at least every week.
3. I have no message boards etc (how can I possibly think of it as a community site!!!). Originally my purpose was to direct people to the existing online groups etc, but having a community forum on a site itself, means people visit more often, and, since Yahoos Clubs & Groups merger, theren't aren't many nz pagan message boards anymore, only e-groups.
There's a bunch of stuff I should do on the site and haven't, but even if I'm doing a bad job, it's still better than me not doing it at all. :)
And, if I ever do get the site running as I wish, I was thinking of starting a site for Geek Pagans :D
There's a weirdly high percentage of us - the only big-name geeks I've found so far are Eric Raymond & the guy who created (co-created?) VRML but there's probably a few more...
Oh yeah, and critique's of site, design (what design?) etc are welcomed.
BBSs did it better (Score:1)
Way back when, before the web, when I dialed into a local BBS I think there was a greater sense of community. Everyone was a local call away. They couldn't just click to the next link at their first urge to do so. The heroic characters who ran BBS's usually created something in their likeness. Although it was often only text, the alias BBSs I remember were more private, more close, and more homegrown. I had much less to choose from so a guy who seemed to know about 'X' was more rare.
Its something of an obstacle to local web sites that the Web does not promote middle men. Most people take their interests to the web and try to find the best place from the whole world where they have expression. Fly tying, writing, computers etc its not likely that the best site is your local city.
Regions should make online databases available, that they keep up, modify, and that basically reflect their area. That would make them _the place_ for local data, bylaws, garbage days etc.... then spin that user traffic into a community.
Thats actually the way it works in real life isn't it. Towns weren't created because they promoted a sense of spirit, or to justify the existance of some organization they formed from a real need.
Bo
time will tell (Score:1)
Jon Katz have tried to bring it up earlier.
Personally I have researched how to benefit real geographical communities with an online companion for almost 10 years now.
I started with the bbs's, but was limited by availability of technology and lack of technological experience by the commoners at that time. Then with the web I started discovering the oportunities in 93.
My conclusion so far is that it is possible and the local web communities, as a tool for each individual, may very well become important parts of our infrastructure in this modern world of information technology.
My discoveries were that it would require enormous resources to move from thought to action. Since 93 till now, I have produced several larger papers on subject and have notes and drawings taking up a significant amount of space.
In order to turn my vision into something tangible I started a company in 96 to further my research and develop the necessary tools. Tools are required, tools for the people to produce activity, tools are the most important asset. With no tools, there will be no activity, and the level of activity is the primary indicator of success or failure.
Concider this my own little
http://egnsnet.dk will contain something sooner or later. now nothing. pardon me for not disclosing any detailed information. agreements with investors prohibits me from doing so at this time.
Ghosttown mentioned (Score:2)
Did they expect massive success by taking a bulletin board and putting (arguably) ugly graphics on it? It seems to only be catering to a small geopgraphic area, but the domain name seems to indicate it would be for a wider audience.
Geography is Key - Discussions,Content, or Access? (Score:2, Interesting)
The use of global internet tools in very local communities has tremendous potential. Embrace geography. Love geography. This is not high school anymore, use your technical skills to benefit everyone even those jocks who pushed you around.
However, when you mix the goals of Internet access, local content, and local discussions/information exchange most non-profit/voluntar individual/commercial efforts fail without some level of subsidy. Figure out what you want to do most and do that well.
With Minnesota E-Democracy [e-democracy.org] we have focused on the use of e-mail lists for state and local political/community discussion since 1994. We use e-mail lists with web archives to reach thousands of people on an ongoing basis. We are completely volunteer-based, have a donated web site, and are completing a move to Mailman [list.org] from Yahoogroups in part because of their marketing/privacy shift.
We have a wealth of experience and articles available on my web site [publicus.net].
Steven Clift
Another Community Network that works (Score:1)
And another community-- sort of (Score:1)
As a coffeedrinker I found it fascinating and I've asked for a similar web cam here but everybody thinks I'm joking.
Considering the community this web cam serves is on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean I guess I'm only involved in this community out of a sense of long-distance voyeurism...
...but I can get help for that.
Chebucto Community Net (Score:2)
community network life cycle? (Score:1)
I worked for the Omnifest Community Network in Milwaukee WI starting in 1993 and still maintain a rudimentary web site [uwm.edu] about it.
We offered dial-up service, email, interactive bulletin boards using CIX bulletin board software (developed by Tristate Online in Cincinnati OH) on a DEC workstation housed at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. In the pilot stage it was only open to local high school teachers, librarians, and UW-Milwaukee alumni, then it was opened to elementary and secondary schools, then the public.
Because there weren't a lot of other ways for non-university people to get onto the internet, the services were much in demand and we had a loyal following. For instance, the text-based interface enabled visually impaired people with screen readers to participate and we had bulletin boards sponsored by the Badger Association for the Blind. Many volunteers moderated bulletin boards and posted community information as well as providing technical support for users. I helped train volunteers and provide phone support and will attest that there was a real spirit of community service.
Operating as a non-profit organization presented problems. In addition to the obvious difficulty getting financial support, I got the idea that a lot of people didn't trust us. While members usually appreciated the low charges, we would get many calls a day asking about the service then get a lecture about how that was no way to run a business! We were charging $25 a year with even lower pricing plans for students who registered through their schools as a deliberate choice to keep the service open to everyone in the community. Libraries and community centers made computers available so that it users didn't even have to own their own computers to participate. It just didn't seem that people could grasp the idea of an organization run by a community for the mutual benefit of the members of the community rather than for profit.
Well, the inevitable happened. Omnifest closed in 1998. I feel we contributed greatly to the popularization of using the Internet in our community only to be set aside when Internet access via the WWW became commercially viable. Much of the demise was due to technological advances too, for instance, the text-based interface worked well with 2400K modems readily available then.
I was about to write the extensive community sponsored by SEFLIN [seflin.org] in Florida as an example of a community network which had successfully evolved into a web site, but that appears to be gone too. Sigh...
Kathy A. Graff
Milwaukee WI USA
the c3 project (Score:1)
if you're in the seattle area around may 16-19 you might want to check out the shaping the network society [cpsr.org], which is going to have presentations galore on wired and wireless community networks.
Community Discussions need Better Technology Tools (Score:2, Interesting)
In the specific area of online discussions in local communities we [e-democracy.org] need your advice. Related discussions on this has occured on the Democracies Online Code Network e-mail list [yahoo.com] for civic-minded techies.
We use e-mail lists. They work. Our participants love them. They need to work better with the web. We do not need a web-based system that treats e-mail participants as second class citizens. Our thousands of users won't make the transition - and we are not going to sacrifice our sustainable non-profit model that has worked for eight years.
In an ideal world someone would create an e-mail/web system akin to a cleaner, crisper Yahoogroups but something better that you can host on your own domain.
What we have:
Mailman [list.org] with additional archives using Mail-Archive [mail-archive.com]. (We are moving our last few lists off Yahoogroups.)
Basic web pages with forum information [e-democracy.org], hundreds of Minnesota-specific political links [e-democracy.org], and special election/candidate link directories [e-democracy.org].
What we need in term of priority:
1. Advanced Web Archives and Subject Line Syndication - Improved web access to our e-mail forum archives including the ability to post via the web to -recent- messages by "no e-mail" members, the ability to automatically display via RSS the most recent subject lines from our various lists on our home page/other key web pages to posts in the archives. Hypermail [hypermail.org], Mhonarc [mhonarc.org] just don't cut it. They were great in their time, but we need something that takes advantage of MySQL, allows for linear display of posts in the same thread, and other tools. More on this ... [yahoo.com].
2. Member Preferences Page - A single page like Yahoogroups where someone can control their settings on the all the lists they subscribe to on our server. We'd also like to allow people to recommend new e-mail lists for their local communities and essentially reserve a spot by letting us know that they are interested in a specific city/county/region or statewide public policy issue. We do not open community discussions without at least 100 participants and have an extensive public outreach process that goes with each new lists (i.e. online and in-person recruiting). If we recruit 50,000 "e-citizens" across Minnesota we need to use technology to help shape our forum development priorities.
3. Member Directory with Archive Links - (Again, we are not interested/able to use a web-centric conferencing system) This is where the web can complement our e-mail environment. I'd like each member to have the option to share information about themselves (our rules for posting including signing your real name, we have to use personal accountability in our model for online political discourse or everything would be pure crap). I'd like each e-mail that goes through the list server to insert their member directory page URL. From the member-directory page I'd to present both the information provided by the participants but also links to their recent posts across our various forums. And perhaps ...
4. Participant Ratings - With unmoderated mailing lists, rating each post before it is delivered is impossible. Even if we moderate our lists, a multiple moderater bottle neck among our mostly non-techie audience would cause major delays in discourse. So ... one idea is to allow participants to optionally vote +1 substance, -1 for style for any post after it is distributed. We don't want to create a situation where people simply vote against people of other ideologies (we have a cherished and extremely rare cross-political spectrum audience) so some sort of forumula would have to be developed to give various weight to votes (i.e. repeat votes by one individual against another count less over time) and always bring the rating toward zero over time. Oh - why do this? While our unmoderated lists to have forum managers who have the power to sanction participants who violate our rules and guidelines, we ultimately believe that self-regulation, and group self-governance is our strength. We walk on a tight rope between chaos and control in order to keep and build our participatory civic audience based on our democratic and community purpose.
5. E-Newsletter Distributed Content Management System - We have currently have 4,000+ people on our general announcement list (over next five years we'd like it to raise it to 50,000 or 1% of Minnesotans). We are planning a once or twice monthly e-mail newsletter with various content sections. I'd like to give our volunteer editor the tools to allow other volunteers to submit content (i.e. event lists, Minnesota political history this month, quotes of the month from our forums) on a regular basis into key sections of the newsletter and assuming that some content will be to long for e-mail newsletter format, something that integrates with a longer web section. 6. Mailman Advancements? Or another list packages. As an organization we'd like the ability to send one message to everyone on one of our lists without double posting. For our volunteer list managers we need the ability to quickly delete all the non-member (mostly spam) posts in one or two clicks and not have to click and select every post. What list packages [yahoo.com] do people recommend?
If you actually read this far, you should join the DO-CODE e-mail list [mailto] that I mentioned above.
Cheers, Steven Clift [publicus.net]
Finding People To Help Out (Score:1)
a lot of people like the site and praise me, but hardly anyone wants to lend a helping hand.
It is dam hard especially when im not a coder (and dont want to be one). The site is still gaining popularity but with out help i'll have to close it soon.
Are we back to BBS's?? (Score:1)
Seattlewireless status (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.seattlewireless.net
DfC Essay: Blending the real and virtual worlds (Score:1)
Getting real: Virtual communities that break the fourth wall [designforcommunity.com]
"Of course there is a real world out there when you're engaged in a virtual community. But, in most cases, the web world and the real one rarely intersect. A few websites are changing all that."
LunarStorm..swedish community.. over 1000000 users (Score:1)
Quite successful web-community reaching pretty much every person in sweden between 10 and 25 with just a slight computer interest..
Hehe, I'm helping out on a much smaller community with around 4000 users now...the poor linuxbox can barely take it
Ohwell...
craigslist.org growing into community network? (Score:1)
Edgewood Terrace, DC (Score:1)
This was all supported by an active computer training facility (5 classrooms with 10-20 PCs per). Classes were offered in basic computing, Office, Web Dev, and a couple of IT employment training fields.
It was not a perfect solution, but the impact it made was incredible. An example: a former welfare mother is now on the WebDev team at National Geographic. She still maintains correspondence with Steve Balmer (who she met at the groundbreaking).
This was developed starting in 1995, and is an ongoing project. Knowing what I do now (and having made the spiritual conversion to Linux), I would do things differently. Same architecture, but different platform.
Anyway, the non-profit running the project is Community Preservation and Development Corporation [cpdc.org]. The project has been slow to adopt the web, both to support the community and to publicize the successes and failures, but you can visit what they do have here [edgenet.org].
Community Momentum (Score:1)
urban75.com : Was even in the UK national press! (Score:1)
The web site and forum are now being used by the community to organise protests and petitions for his return to the force, after he was suspended after allegations of allowing a boyfriend (yes, just to make the story even more juicy for the Press, he was openly gay) to smoke cannabis. He has proved very popular with the populace (a figure quoted on the website is 83% approval), and they are campaigning for his return to the police force.
Read more [urban75.org] at the website.
On the humour site, you might want to see the Punch a Celebrity [urban75.org] page: although most of them are British, so the non-British may be bemused by these "celebrities"...!
PS Brixton is an area of London (England) in case you didn't know.
The Blacksburg Electronic Village is no success! (Score:2)
Basically, it's a college dorm network. The only difference is that VTech students live in dorm-like off campus apartments built by private developers. These are wired into VTech's university network. BFD. No one but VTech undergrads lives in these apartments. So it's not as if real Blacksburg residents and businesses are particularly wired. Outside the little student enclave, the broadband situation is like the rest of rural America- it sucks!
Chamber of Commerce (Score:2)