Slashdot Log In
Community Networks and Websites?
Posted by
michael
on Sun May 05, 2002 09:36 PM
from the potluck dept.
from the potluck dept.
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?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
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)
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.
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)
Parent
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:2)
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
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).
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!
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
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.
Matching the site to the community (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who live in the community come from all walks of life and embrace most age groups, religious backgrounds, levels of financial stability, etc. However, having talked to a large number of them, I have come to an understanding of some of the general functions and premises that would build a great community website.
First is universal access. A website doesn't do a community any good if there are some who cannot (not to read will not) gain access to it. Currently there is a single computer and dial up internet connection at the main office available for public use. After talking with the board of directors for the co-operative, they have agreed that if I could get enough interest and show sufficient progress and early participation from community members that they would be willing to purchase three additional computers and install high speed internet...its a start. (Note: about 78% of the residences in my community have Internet connected computers).
Of the things that I have discovered that are most desired are:
1. A community schedule of events
2. An online copy of the co-operatives manuals
3. A set of community chat boards
4. A news board for non co-operative sponsored happenings
5. An online booking resource for the co-operative's public maintenance and groundscare equipment
6. A community for sale / wanted board
7. A babysitting service listing / opportunities
8. A personalized reminder / scheduling system for those community members who have tasks assigned
9. A place for people to publish their thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, etc...(moderated of course)
10. A place where some of the more creative souls in the community could write the occaisonal column or review for their friends to read
11. A listing of all the public facilities with up to date descriptions and comments on availability
12. A birthday / anniversary board
13. A listing of all the businesses in the area such as stores, restaurants, etc. where the members can post reviews, critiques,etc.
14. A member listing
15. A security and advisory alert
16. Links to other pertinent and community-useful sites on the internet.
17. Personal pages for some of the members
There really isn't much else that the community has currently expressed interest in so I won't try to include anything that isn't needed yet. As the title to my comment notes, you have to target the community with the website.
These are just suggestions that have come my way. I plan to implement them in stages as time and resources permit. Currently I have just the basic foundations laid out so this is quite a timely discussion for me.
As for the site, I have a service plan through my service provider that has a static IP and a domain name...I will be offering it to the community as part of my contribution as a member of the co-operative.
I will be making every available attempt to make the site fast, easy to use, and personable for as many people as I can. You cannot usually please everyone, but if I can get most of them then we're laughing. Who knows, if this takes off, I might box it up and offer the basics to other co-operatives to use...anyways, thanks for letting me share my thoughts.
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.
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.
Square Bob Sponge Pants (Score:2)
Would I do it again? (Score:2)
City Stories (Score:2)
Ghost town-like failures (Score:2)
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
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.
What about Wikis? :-) (sites one can participe) (Score:2, Informative)
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
Chebucto Community Net (Score:2)
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]
Seattlewireless status (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.seattlewireless.net
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)