Jane Austen folks and the austen conference

Amy said thus: Terry I was going to call you today to talk about some things, but here is a good opportunity to report something we were talking about in the Drawing Room last night. Joan has had a lot of experience as a participant in discussion lists and is very fearful that the inability to respond to individual messages may stifle the spontaneous flow of conversation we had with the branching board. I should not put it all on Joan. Lots of us miss the ability to see the structure of the responses, to change subjects in midstream and enjoy some of the other features of the wild and wooly outline style. I am so grateful to you for being so accomodating and giving us what seems to be such reliable server space that I tend to be determined to make this system work. Indeed if it has worked so well in other venues, I must believe that a) we can accomodate to the format, or b) that the format can be adapted to us. Plus, I don't want to acknowledge that format can play a life or death role in the whole feel of a community. So many other variables are in play: our common interests, affection for each other, need to convene. What has been your experience with each format and what is your opinion about the intuitiveness and naturalness of each? Amy My reply will be in the next response.

Many other virtual communities like the WELL, ECHO, and Electric Minds (where you originally posted the above comment) have struggled with finding the optimum user interface. Electric Minds is going through this right now. The WELL just went through a major revision. This is an age old and hotly debated argument, threaded responses vs a linear model for responses. It seems like the users in these other communities have adapted pretty well to this format, even if it is not ideal in every way. And these are the only communities on the Internet that I know of that have been relatively successful. I have yet to experience a widely adopted and successful community which uses the branching or discrete threaded way of handling responses. Perhaps yours is the exception. Should it become a sine qua non for your exisitence, we can research other conferencing software and set up your group on another one of our servers. Do you have some specific software in mind? What was the system you were on before using? Have you posed this question to Dave Thaler in the yapp conference? He would be a good one to ask, as he is the author of yapp 3.0 and had reasons for designing it the way he did.

] Should it become a sine qua non for your exisitence, we can research other conferencing software and set up your group on another one of our servers. Terry, that is the answer to a question I was almost too shy to ask. Re: asking Dave? No, I don't know him well enough yet. But maybe I will repost my comments there. I would like to get some of our little band in on this. I notice a function in the admin area for linking one conference to another. How exactly do I go about doing this? I could just do a link in HTML, but what is the path for the actual or exact URL for a topic file? Thanks for everything. Amy

I should add: I want to try to work with Yapp first, before looking at other options.

You know I'm dumbfounded. I don't know how to link off the top of my head. I believe if you type htlp link at a prompt if you're logged into the shell version of yapp, it will tell you. Have you checked out the help files? Have you read through some of our previous trials and tribulations in the yapp conference?

I will figure it out Terry, I nearly always do. ] Have you read through some of our previous trials and tribulations in the yapp conference? Yes. I have not studied it but I believe such things are better than real manuals. Amy

Hi Terry - Amy asked me to drop over here and share some thoughts which we had recently discussed over in the Pemberley room. ] Terry said: I have never seen a full blown community coalesce overnight in the manner that the austen conference has here on the Spring. In a matter of three days, an entire village has come into being here on the Spring. Ah, but Terry, it did not "grow" here overnight - it migrated here already, full-grown. It did, however, in a remarkably short time, grow into a community cohesive enough that it was not blown apart when faced with failed technology. While I was not one of those who were there "in the beginning" (sometime during the summer, I believe) I arrived in August, and against my better judgement, could not resist jumping into the discussion. ] Terry said: ] I have yet to experience a widely adopted and successful community which uses the branching or discrete threaded way of handling responses. Perhaps yours is the exception. Not "the" exception, but an example. There are others. I've recently "celebrated" my 10th anniversary of participation in various online communities, and know quite well what kind of a commitment one makes when one joins. It will carve out a chunk of your time in the same way that joining an athletic team or a performing group or leading a scout troup or being a hospital volunteer or some other "real-time" activity will. The advantage is that you can participate anytime - at your own convenince. The disadvantage is that you can participate anytime - approp iate or not. The danger is actual addiction. Because of the recent threat to the survival of the P&P2 group, some of its members have been in the danger zone during the past few days, and many P&P2-ers have gone into online overdose. It will be good to settle in a new relatively secure location so people can stop behaving as if each day were the last day of their lives. It's a good sign that last night the Pemberley chat room was vacant between Midnight EST and 11PM PST and tonight at 6PM PST there was nobody there.. People are starting to get ba k to "normal". (Pardon my philosophizing a bit - I am suffering from a strong case of deja vu. Somewhat on that topic later)

Part 2 When I arrived on Amy's doorstep in August, the nucleus of a community was already there. All of the condidions were right. A group of voluntary participants with a serious interest in a particular topic, but not so serious that they took themselves too seriously, BB software that made free flow of ideas easy even for the novice, and leadership which, while firmly enforcing a few basic standards such as copyright and obscenity issues did not over-manage, and led by example rather than by laying d wn rigid rules of behavior. These conditions were ideal for the growth of this particular type of community, which, because of its recreational nature, does not have to be concerned with issues such as productivity, deadlines, or staying "on task." (A different style of leadership and software management could be better suited to some other types of community.) One of the P&P2 participants, in talking abut why she preferred P&P2 over another community with a similar focus of content, said that the other group had started out being quite spontaneous and then someone had decided to moderate and then rules were made, and others argued over the rules and still others continually tested the limits and that in the process, much of the fun and liveliness had gone out of it. (Though I have not visited it, this other group would appear to be having a little identity cr sis on its hands - as to whether it is primarily a "recreational" group or a "scholarly" group, and some whose preference is for a more recreational group seem to find the current management style a bit restrictive.) Over the past 10 years, I've had a chance to observe the factors that encourage and discourage formation of "living" electronic communities, and one of the key factors is the software. The more intuitive and automatic the software can be, the greater the freedom of the participants to interact in ways that promote community growth. The more time they have to spend figuring out, remembering how to operate, and/or manually controling the software, the less time there is for interaction, and the less spont neous interaction will be. Part 3- What was the system you were on before using? The software that was used on the P&P2 BB (apart from being somewhat slow to load) is the best implementation for the promotion of a sense of commuity that I've seen. Aside from the advantages of being able to include links and graphics within postings, its method of linking postings to one another is completely fluid. The main page displays not just the subject lines of the main topics, but of each response, and each response to each resopnse, in a cascading format. People are also allowed to modify o completely change the subject line at any point within the cascade. If a particular subject change attracts more traffic than the original thread, Amy was able to move it out and have it become a main topic (as can the participants if they choose to). Furthermore, within each posting there is a direct link backward to the response that generated it and forward to any follow-ups that it may have generated. This makes it possible for a "silly" thread to spring from a serious one without "forcing" those interested only in the serious side to put up with it. Because all postings are physically linked to one another, it's harder for novices to accidentally post in the "wrong" topic, eliniates the need for the poster to tell others where to look for the original post, and reduces the need for quoting of original text. Because the software automaticlly quotes the text of the posting being followed up, it also makes it easy for participants to indicate (with judicious snipping and/or paraphrasing) exactly what they are making reference to. And this particular s ftware was also an html teacher, in that quoted material in the text entry window included the html tags, so people could learn how to produce the various formatting effects. The main page also keeps track of what a participant has or hasn't already seen with color coding, so all that anyone using most web browsers has to do is point and click. No typing in of numbers; no waiting for postings that one is not intersted in seeing to load and then having to scroll past them; no trying to guess how far back one has to go to locate the message that a particular post was responding to. In short, the way that this particular software automatically threads postings and allows for easy point and click navigation frees the participants from having to think much at all about the technology, and permits them to participate more spontaneously, naturally and conversationally. They don't have to wait till the end of a thread to chime in; they don't risk forgetting what they meant to say by the time that they get to the end of a thread. Threaded browsing also permits for comfortable coexista ce between the serious and the silly, and allows participants to get to know and like one another as individuals aside from their single shared interest in some particular topic. The major disadvantage to this format seems to be that it keeps each posting as a separate file, which makes the "janitorial" management more difficult and time consuming for the administrator(s).

Part 4 - DEJA VUE I have a particular reason for feeling strongly about the significance of threaded conversation in community-building. Between August of '86 and July of '90 I was involved in the creation of the first online network for educators. It was an R&D project of McGraw-Hill, but the philosophy of the development team was that it should be built by educators, not by technicians, and they gathered a core group of educators from all over North America, provided tech support and consultation regarding online commu ities, and started building. At that time there was no such thing as a graphic interface and many participants were using Apple IIs and Commodore Pets and Tandy machines for access. The software had to be universally accessible. They chose CoSy, then already in use on MGH's electronic version of Byte Magazine. It featured the option for either chronological or threaded reading of messages, and permitted responses to be directly "attached" to any other message, and also permitted one to change the subject line when appropriate. By the time (4 years later) when MGH made a buisness decision to drop the network (along with all other electronic "products"), there was a subscriber base of about 3000 educators, with about 200 who participated as members of the greater MIX community, not just members of their own particular subject area's conference(s). Among those who participated actively and daily, and carried on informally in the online teachers' lounge, virtually all were using the threaded option, and had become close online fri nds, many of whom and made particular efforts to meet up in person with their online colleagues whenever possible. As an epitaph for that community, here's something that I sent to Amy earlier this week. (But this is not yet the end of this tale!) The other similar occasion (to the threatened loss of P&P2) that comes to mind is when McGraw-Hill made a "business decision" to end a 4-year-old network for teachers which they had been developing - and quite successfully, too. A genuine community had evolved there, and while there was no chat feature enabled, on the last night before the plug was pulled they turned off the connect time meter, and all incoming lines were in use as people engaged in "pseudochat" - converging on a single confe ence and repeatedly giving the "new" command to see what others were typing about. At that time I was on sabbatical and in grad school, and was working there 1/4 time doing customer support, and in order to make use of all possible lines, the sysop called me on the voice phone and asked me to log off and come in on his private emergency access line - the one that stayed up even when the others all went down. (Mine was the only ID with enough access "privilege" to get in that way.) Had a few bad moments hen I had difficulty getting back on thru UNIX but did finally get re-connected. Bob (sysop) was to pull the plug at midnight, and everyone who was there just "sat" there online till they were shut off. And in the end, there were just Bob and I all by ourselves on the corpse of the net. Very depressing. Had to log myself off. And we never "saw" many many of those good friends again. It had been the hope of all that we would be able to find a new home for our network, and, indeed, by October, one had been found, but MGH considered its subscriber list to be "proprietary" information and would not let us have it - even tho they no longer had a competing product to sell - so we had no way of letting folks know where we had re-located or how to reach us again. MGH also would not allow us to use the name, so basically, the organizers of the (former) MIX network started over from scratch o a different host with a different name - and with different software - Caucus. After our own training, all of us were convinced that Caucus was both harder to learn and less conducive to conversation than CoSy had been, but our new sysops assured us that that was just because we were not used to it. Well, to make a long story short, all of us being the same people who we were over on MIX, and a lot more experienced now than we had been then, we were unable to re-create that same sense of community with a new group of subscribers starting from scratch using Caucus. The orgnaizing p ople were the same, the content was the same, the software was the only variable that was different. The task-oriented conferences went very well, but those in which conversation - both recreational, and regarding professional issues (such as restructuring and site based management) sat idle except for contributions by those from the moderator team who attempted to stir up some action. No sense of wider community ever developed, and now in its 6th year, the "new" network is on its last legs - and will be mourned by few, since it never really came to life. And after using Caucus for 2 years longer than we used CoSy, we still feel that the non-threaded format has not been as easy for the new people to learn, or as conducive to spontaneous interaction, as a threaded interface.

Part 5 - Have you posed this question to Dave Thaler in the yapp conference? Not in any great detail - the preliminary response from Dave to Amy's initial questions make it appear that he is pretty well committed to the linear thread philosophy, and the majority of our folks prefer the flexibility of the threaded format that was used at Amy's Bluemarble site. He would be a good one to ask, as he is the author of yapp 3.0 and had reasons for designing it the way he did. The main purpose for bringing up requests for additional eatures to Dave would be if he were interested in trying to modify yapp so that it could function in either mode, depending on the needs of the participants. If he pretty much likes it the way it is, there isn't any point in making waves just for the sake of making waves. The file management problems inherent in having each posting a separate file which we have already encountered certainly make it worthwhile to try working with Yapp first, before looking at other options, but I believe that there is the possibility that we may also want to explore other options if any more stable software more similar to what we started with is discovered. The following exchange snatched from the Pemberley chat room illustrates my concern. From: Newbie (New Msg) at 11/26/96 6:01 PM I followed the link from Amy's P&P2 page, where I'd left a message a couple of days ago - following my interest in Pride & Prejudice. From: P&P2-er (New Msg) at 11/26/96 6:04 PM Have you been to the Spring? That is where we are set up for now. From: Newbie (New Msg) at 11/26/96 6:05 PM Yes, but it was a bit confusing trying to follow the topics - I feel I'm missing something somewhere. This is enough for now. Probably more than enough. (but there's more where it came from.)

Thanks for the detail, Joan. I'd never had the whole story from you and it is a good case history. A lot of what you say makes sense. Let's try out all of Yapp's tricks. There are some buried treasures in here, I think that we don't see on the screen right now. Glad you are willing to give it a chance. This virtual community thing is fascinating.

Terry, One trouble with our group is not that we are cliche-ish. That's not why we have not spread, I don't think. One problem is that we all of us spend too much time online already. We are obsessive types generally, we have found. Idea. Use the link function judiciously to spread the influence of our conversations. I used it to link the Austen conference work assignment topic to appead in the projects conference as well. Example: take the English Patient and Emma threads from Austen and make them appear in TV and movies. Amy

Excellent idea!