Topic 2 of 52: The Spring as a community
Thu, Aug 7, 1997 (06:39) |
Paul Terry Walhus (terry)
Is the Spring a community? In what sense? Would it take more folks
knowing each other personally for this to happen? How can we become
more of a community?
12 responses total.
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 1 of 12: KitchenManager (KitchenManager) * Fri, Oct 10, 1997 (06:59) * 7 lines
Uh, maybe I could not wait so long between postings?
Actually, I finally have a computer so I should be able
to post more often.
Yippee,
WER
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 2 of 12: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sat, Oct 11, 1997 (20:05) * 1 lines
Great news, WER!
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 3 of 12: KitchenManager (KitchenManager) * Wed, Oct 15, 1997 (01:21) * 4 lines
The best things in life are nearest:
in your nostrils.
WER
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 4 of 12: Mike Griggs (mikeg) * Thu, Oct 23, 1997 (06:44) * 2 lines
Is the Spring a community? If so, which communitarian aspects does it simulate
and which does it thumb its nose at?
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 5 of 12: Stacey Vura (stacey) * Thu, Oct 23, 1997 (10:21) * 1 lines
Well, Mike, we're more into stimulating than simulating and we don't thumb our noses at anyone (but sometimes we pick them).
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 6 of 12: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Thu, Oct 23, 1997 (12:19) * 4 lines
She's right ya know. We're working on it. On being a community.
There are some meager rules on the main page, nothing beyond common
sense and courtesy.
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 7 of 12: KitchenManager (KitchenManager) * Thu, Oct 23, 1997 (22:38) * 4 lines
I'm not quite sure what you're asking, Mike.
Could you go into a bit more detail?
WER
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 8 of 12: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Thu, Nov 6, 1997 (08:53) * 17 lines
Did I ever mention about how the Spring got started?
It started probably with my early exposure to the EIES network and to the
WELL in the early days. I remember hitching a ride with fig to the offices of the
Whole Earth Software Review where fig was an r:base programmer and looking through
the software archives. Cliff turned me on to a copy of Appleworks (which was then a
beta) to review and I installed it on my Apple //e and started logging in to the early
WELL. I was living in Bolinas on the mesa at the time with Gail Moss and we used to
go over to Cliff and Anitas house and hung out and talked about computers and online
community some. I had been a "Farmie" for a while like fig and I had some ideals
about community building. I had been an urban planner for a number of years also.
I thought that it would be cool to start up a community like this in Austin some day.
Eventually I did make it back to Austin and started the Spring dialup bbs around
the mid 80s. And three years ago we broke it out on the net like I was saying.
But I'm getting ahead of the question now.
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 9 of 12: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Tue, Jan 19, 1999 (14:12) * 71 lines
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/01/cov_19feature.html
is a good article on the meaning and misuse of online "community"
- - - - - - - - t h e r e_.g o e s_.t h e
___neighborhood
ARE COMPANIES LIKE GEOCITIES
TRULY "BUILDING COMMUNITIES" -- OR
JUST PLASTERING ADS ON INCOMPLETE,
OUT-OF-DATE WEB PAGES?
BY JANELLE BROWN | Welcome to my home at GeoCities. I live at 9258 Fashion
Avenue, in a neighborhood appropriately called Salon. I moved in here
earlier last week because I was told that "Design, Beauty and Glamour are
the toast of Fashion Avenue," but so far there's not a whiff of glamour to
be seen -- my neighborhood is a ghost town of hundreds of empty pages,
half-started Web sites and vacant lots; only a handful of the members seem
to be at all interested in fashion. I suppose my bare-bones Web page is no
better.
GeoCities may call itself the "largest and fastest growing community of
personal Web sites on the Internet," but there's no community to be found
in my neighborhood.
"Community" is quite possibly the most over-used word in the Net industry.
True community -- the ability to connect with people who have similar
interests -- may well be the key to the digital world, but the term has
been diluted and debased to describe even the most tenuous connections,
the most minimal interactivity. The presence of a bulletin board with a
few posts, or a chat room with some teens swapping age/sex information, or
a home page with an e-mail address, does not mean that people are forming
anything worthy of the name community.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the free Web page services -- sites
like GeoCities or theglobe.com that give away free Web space and then sell
ad space based on the traffic that "user-generated content" attracts. Such
companies have been the darlings of Wall Street over the past year. But it
remains to be seen if they can preserve the cozy promises of community
that they've made to their constituency with the lavish promises of
profits that they've had to make to their investors and shareholders.
Free Web page services are one of the fastest growing sectors of the Web
industry, enabling any person with Net access to slap up a Web site using
simple tools. You can choose from scores of services: Not only the
granddaddies like GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, theglobe.com and Xoom, but
smaller services like FreeYellow, FortuneCity, Nettaxi and Homestead. You
can even create a home page at your favorite portal; all they ask is that
they be allowed to put ads on your page.
Undoubtedly, you've visited one of these services at some point -- whether
you are a member of one of them yourself (together, the top seven services
boast more than 20 million members) or have simply stopped by one of the
member pages (GeoCities' member pages alone claim 8 percent of the content
on the Web). If you haven't visited one, perhaps you've invested in them
instead: Xoom, GeoCities and theglobe.com had three of the hottest initial
public stock offerings of 1998, and Lycos picked up Tripod for $58
million, which it now runs along with the previously acquired Angelfire.
These companies have ambitiously promoted their "communities," boasting of
their astronomical numbers of members and interactive interest groups. But
there's a breakdown between what's being hyped and what's actually
happening at these sites: Few of the members actually seem to be
communicating with one another. Most people, it seems, just want a place
to slap up a picture of their cat.
And there's more. This is an excerpt.
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 10 of 12: wer (KitchenManager) * Wed, Jan 20, 1999 (23:48) * 1 lines
can't disagree with her...
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 11 of 12: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Wed, Jun 26, 2002 (15:16) * 13 lines
" As we
all know, it's not the software or the UI or the business model or even
the management that makes a VC vibrant. It's the presence of a few
catalytic people who initiate and stimulate. And on the opposite end,
there are the energy vampires and community saboteurs who can chill a
happening community into inaction and dysfunction. Organizations that
want to foster online community need to find the right people to lead
them, and that talent-scouting is a skill in itself.
- Cliff Figallo
great quote, Cliff
Topic 2 of 52 [vc]: The Spring as a community
Response 12 of 12: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Fri, Mar 11, 2005 (12:13) * 74 lines
http://www.communityguy.com/index.cfm?commentID=172
What is community?
Posted by: Jake
What is "community"? As a community development professional, this is a question that comes up often. I often have conversations with colleagues, industry friends, and other business people about what this means.
People often think that blogs, forums, wikis, and other tools are community. In actuality, those tools are just that - tools. They can help you to build community, but they aren't actually "community". When we talk community, we're simply talking about an interaction, a connection. Blogs or forums are a way to initiate and sustain that interaction.
Several years back, I was on a team at work that helped to define the community development/support strategy for the company. We needed to develop a clear, agreed upon definition of what "community" meant, at least to us. I did a ton of research to find what others in the industry and around the Web were using a definition. By far the closest thing we can to a real definition was Derek Powzak's version from his incredible book Design for Community (which if you haven't read, you should ... today!). We tweak, poked, prod, pulled, and shaped all this new found knowledge, as well as our own brainstorming into the definition below.
What do you think?
---
A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons.
Group
A group can be 2 or more people. Most, if not all, communities will change and evolve as they are subject to growth or reduction. During these processes, they may destabilize, or turn into a very different type of community. As such, the number of people involved can make a huge difference for the character of the community and the kinds of relationships and interactions that form.
Relationships
Relationships in this context can vary greatly depending on the community. They can be very deep, long-term relationships, or much looser relationships. Basically, some bond has to form between members of the group described above. And like any relationship, as the group evolves (and grows and shrinks) this relationship will continue to change.
This word "relationship" is key to any discussion of community.
Over time
Relationships can form over time either forward or backwards. You can form relationships in a community because of prospective reasons (I want to get involved with these people) or retrospective reasons (I have a long-standing connection to these people).
Interacting
The most common forms of interaction in a community involve some form of communication or expression, such as showcasing LEGO creations, dropping an email to say hi, or working together on organizing an offline event. Additionally, interaction doesn't necessarily include the entire community all the time.
These interactions lead to the forming of relationship bonds, described above. They can be formed using any number of tools, including email, IM, phone, snail mail, in person meetings, blogs, WIKIs, etc. Sometimes these interactions happen for the entire community to participate in, such as a discussion board thread in a web community. But very often, these “full community” interactions are driving smaller group, more personal interactions.
Regularly
Community must come together in some form on a ongoing basis. Regularly doesn't assume that this interaction is on a set schedule, but rather that there is or will be interaction at some point in the future and/or has been at some point in the past. It's nearly impossible to form a relationship, after all, if you never see or talk to the other person/people.
Object
What makes community more than a simple group of people is that they are drawn together around some object. This object can be physical, virtual, theoretical, or philosophical; a political ideal, a celebrity, a musical genre, a hobby, a type of car, a neighborhood, a sport.
Individual (reasons)
While community members are drawn together around a single object, they are drawn there for a variety of very personal reasons. We may both love LEGO bricks, but I may love it because I love to build, while you love it because you're a collector of old LEGO sets. Some reasons are emotional; others are more abstract or intellectual. Some have to do more with relationships that form in a community, others with the object of interest.
Each member of the community group has their own reason – or more likely reasons – for joining and being part of a particular community.
vc conference 
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