First time here. Like this type of BB or conferencing better than irc or chat. I like being able to gather my thoughts before responding to something. I was drawn into this area to snuff out info about creating a home page. I have lived in midcoast Maine on and off all my life. I graduated from college with a BA in English, Journalism, Speech Pathology and something else, ah, I think it was anthropology. I am married. We have three children.(One son who is computer literate). We own our own successful business that has nothing to do with computers. We live in a 150 year old sea captains house. We are all heavily involved in local sports(baseball/softball, soccer & basketball, both girls and boys) and recreation. I enjoy writing, photography, video, sports and surfing the Net.

If you need a home page, we'll be happy to help you build one. You can do it here on the Spring if you like. We'll give you an area.

Hi all! I'm Michael Boyle, and I hail from Montreal where I work for an academic journal and am a full-time grad student in Public Policy. My research thus far has concerned the fractures in the political theories upon which North American society are based in the face of such things as the internet. I'll be doing a PhD soon, studying any one of three projects I've written up. I can't decide yet, though! I also am a host over at another conferencing system, Cafe Utne . I host the Mac, Internet, Canada and InfoAge conferences, the last being where we discuss issues that surround the development and growth of the internet upon society - things like virtual community. I'm really happy to be here and to join in the discussion in whatever small way I can. Thanks for letting me know you're here, terry - although I was aware of Spring, your prompt finally got me over here.

And we're lucky you're joining us, Cafe Utne is one of the real players on the net.

Happy Holidays, this happens to be my first time here.

How is everybody tonight?

I'm fine. Welcome Robert.

HELLO

Hello cheezy, are you a cheesehead?

Greetings, I am visiting from Electric Minds....my home away from home...and am delighted to find this place! It's like going away on a vacation...and finding a 'site' where you feel comfortable and cozy...Thanks for "dropping the breadcrumbs". Ya'll come see us now!

Well met, Ginny. Leave us some poems here. I like the idea of having a virtual vacation home. Nice idea. Here's some virtual chocolate cake for the afternoon snack (or evening in your case if my feable pea brain recalls.)

Kinda like visiting another country Ginny? I see you got that password working!

i'm here and happy to notice the changes that have been going on here. my home in cspace is Construct, where i have parked some essays and play in the conferences. but this is a nice place & i like it.

You are nice person to have around our place.

Well, Hi guys&gals. invited me over - not sure where he found me but I'm glad he did. If you visit my web site (http://www.griggs.demon.co.uk/), you can read about my interests and efforts in the area of Virtual Community/Conferencing etc. I'm a former (very short-term) member of The WELL, and more recently of eMinds. However, I like to have my fingers in lots of pies, and I'm trying to draw on the widest area possible. I may open a new topic (if I can - still working out the excellent software here - who needs JavaScript?!) about the practical elements of building community. If you're interested, then pop in!

hmm..sorry about the two errors above. "terry" should be in the first sentence, and the URL should be: http://www.griggs.demon.co.uk/ *grin* *blush*

That's ok, we're glad you're here. I'll look forward to reading your observations.

The topic is now open in this conference. It's called "Building Virtual Community - practical ideas"

Good morning, all! WER

Welcome, KitchenManager :) You seem to have arrived in both the vc and community conferences. What is your interest in community, virtual or otherwise?

Not sure, really. I'll have to think on that one. WER

Think aloud, though - silence is not useful in computer-mediated comms (CMC) :))

Good observation, lurk not.

But, whatever happened to practicing empathy, terry? Probably the biggest reason/need is my severly underdeveloped socialization skills. I am not usually a people person. So it is very hard not to lurk, even in reality. WER

Cyberspace is the medium in which one can most visibly re-invent oneself, without attracting the scorn of those peers who think they "know you" - or to put it more cynically, have put you into their own boxes, their own categories, and are thus not threatened by you any more. We don't suffer from this in virtual community, since the standard fears are removed. As Howard Rheingold said, "We can't kiss each other, and we can't punch each other in the nose, but within those boundaries a lot can happen."

I agree that we tend to let it loose more.

terry, with the vc conference now up and running, could you slightly alter the information about the Community conference (as shown on the Conference Index page). The vc conference is the primary place for Virtual Community stuff!

Will do, what should it say?

erm....just leave out the word "virtual" in the phrase "communities - virtual and realworld" :)

I'll fix that. By the way, we'll be carrying live and recorded video from CFP98 for the next 3 days.

Figured I'd come over here for a sec and check things out. So Hi!!

Hey, Wolf! Feeling the need to roam, looking for a safe haven, or expanding your horizons?

expanding the horizons. see how many other people i can tick off *wink*

I can't believe we had an honest to goodness, good old fashioned, highly cathartic "thrash". We're all usually so mild mannered.

you know, you shoulda e-mailed Sam an invite to join the porch conference, Wolf...

after all that hullabaloo, did he just disappear from the spring? Strange... after all, what's a community without a little dissention?

think he did, but nick has been pretty scarce too....

I see him pop up in poetry every now and again. From absolutely no information whatsoever beyond his public posts, I'd say he's hashing a few things out right now.

think so too.

One thing I am curious about: How many countries are represented in this community?

I would like to invite regulars of this conference to visit the International Conflicts conference here on the Spring: http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/restricted/browse/InternationalConflicts/all This conference is dedicated to the disputes between groups all over the world, be that social, cultural, political or ethnical differences.

Super, Alexander!

Who, me?

I just registered here, at Terry's invitation. I'm a cognitive scientist, studying educational technology and learning theory. I also do work in community building.

I've read a few of your postings at the WELL, and enjoyed them and am somewhat surprised at the rancorous response. Could you tell us a bit about how you got started online, your educational background and what you're up to these days, Barry? Glad you took me up on the invite!

as are we all!

I was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories when UseNet became available around 1980. I've been online since before TCP/IP supplanted UseNet's original UUCP protocols. I've used computers since 1963, when I began with the IBM 7090, IBM 1620, and IBM 360 at the University of Nebraska (BSEE '68 with High Distinction). Bell Labs sent me to Stanford University in 1968 to obtain a Masters, and again in 1970 to obtain a Ph.D. I studied Operations Research and Systems Theory, and put that to work in the Network Planning Division of AT&T Bell Labs. In 1984 I became interested in the relationship of emotions to learning, and began a one-man research program to develop a theory connecting emotions to learning. As part of that work, I began volunteering in the Children's Discovery Center at the Boston Museum of Science in 1988, and in 1990, I launched the MicroMuse/MuseNet Project on the Internet. In 1996, MicroMuse/MuseNet won the coveted NII Award for pioneering innovations in children's educational networking. Since then, I have tried, with limited success, to adapt my earlier work to community building and adult learning. The Orenda Project has been a great success, but only a small fraction of an adult community seem genuinely interested in it. I am frankly vexed by the hostility and antagonism of some of those who express disinterest. I would have expected them simply to ignore it, but that has not been the case. A few have actively opposed it and attempted to undermine it.

Perhaps there's a topic somewhere in which we can discuss how to encorporate some of your concepts and ideas in this community, struggling to acheive growth in more sectors and attract more high level participants such as yourself. Feel free to start topics where we could explore some of your ideas and experiences.

I am definately intrigued by your Orenda Project now, as well...

The Orenda Project was running successfully for several months on a Motet site at UMass Lowell. Unfortunately, the Community Lab where it was sited was way over-extended, and the lone professor who managed it found he needed to scale back. So that site has gone dormant for the summer, and the Orenda Community has been looking for ways to regroup.

Do you think they could inhabit a conference here?

Easily. We had a lively conference on the Motet server at UML with about a dozen active topics.

You're sure welcome to make it happen, Barry, we can be an incubator or a homestead, depending on your needs. Or even a rest stop!

We have a group who have been in withdrawal since the UML Motet site went dark for the summer. It would be good to try to revive them here and see where it leads. At our peak, we were generating a few dozen posts a day, which I am sure would be well within the capacity of this site. The Flowering City site was a Social Contract site, meaning that the participants there had committed to the civil dialogue model. One would be hard pressed to find better citizens.

our arms are open!

and our conferences...

Hi all -- I'm a co-founder of the Orenda Conference with Barry and have worked with him on MicroMuse since 1994, where I'm known as Moonbeam. In my non-virtual life I'm a journalism professor at Utah State University. It's good to find this community!

It's good you're here.

Fairly recently here as well. So far I've been over in the vc conference. Looking for a place that isn't governed by the herd mentality. One of the things that I discovered from the cafe was that the herd mentality is not a function of intelligence. This was an eye opening and sobering experience for myself because I've always thought of myself as fairly intelligent and that the problems in the world were mainly a result of too many stupid people. Excuse me for sounding elitist here, and I still love them all, well except for a few exceptions and those bother my conscience. The herd can't talk about the significant. At first I thought that this was because they were not provided with information that was significant or educated in how to process this information. This isn't a valid excuse in the cafe so it must be something else. My current hypothesis is that if something is acknowledged to be significant there is a moral obligation to rework your belief system to accommodate that which is significant. If the people in the cafe were to do this however it would not be possible for them to continue with their presnt lifestyles and career paths and on a subconscious level they know this. My general feeling is that the mass media is primarily interested in dumbing down the general population because if it knew what was going on they would no longer tolerate the way things are and would rise up in open rebellion. Part of the problem is that the size of our society has created a complexity and a dependence on technology that requires a minimum level of intelligence and creativity. The control freaks haven't come up with a totally satisfactory means of ensuring that the intelligent and creative are only used in the interests of those in control. Anybody know where I can go. Yeah, yeah I know, and that was a cheap shot by the way, but I've been there and I've come back and it's not as hot as they say. :-)

The people left in the Cafe are, for the most part, the ones who haven't yet discovered what they came there to learn. A few of us, perhaps rather foolishly, stayed on to shine a light on the path to the exit from that culture. And so, we haven't learned the lesson of what it means to do something quite so foolhardy as to wake the sleeping.

I really liked the idea of what they claimed to be, and educated and intelligent group of visionaries that liked polite and intelligent discussion of ideas. Maybe the problem was that they had associated themselves with the Reader and I thought that these would be people that identified with these type of ideas. Maybe I would have liked it better if they had billed themselves as a group of friends that liked to talk, and if you don't want to be our friend then *uck off. But they didn't, they presented themselves as a place to discuss the big ideas. Ok, so the where did the ones go that found out what they came there to learn. What was it exactly that we are supposed to learn? That VC's are like every other consumerist product and only meant to amuse and divert us so that we can tolerate living in this society?

Ov it's OK. We too are refugees from Ug..knee (Grin) I was harrassed and attacked for insisting that the rules of logic be used in the Philosophy conferences I attended. You think they were hard on you? The gender statements about women in Philosophy.....wellll...... Thank "the powers that be" Barry and Moonbeam found me and invited me into Orenda.

The thing is that they haven't been hard on me at all. But I know how they have reacted to others and over the next few months I am going to demonstrate the fiat by clique that operates over there. I either want them to explicitly acknowledge it or attempt to move beyond it. Like I said, they haven't been hard on me at all, yet.

Good luck, Ov. Explicit acknowledgments of the obvious are not something that pops out easily from the Cafe Utne culture, under its current management and direction.

hmmm...

Mostly those who graduate from sites like Utne go on to some other, more evolved medium. Perhaps professional journalism, perhaps to write books or articles, perhaps to underground communities, perhaps to write poetry, perhaps into the Ashram. There is a small community at realdiscussions.com. I dunno where the heavyweight thinkers are anymore. Not on Utne. Not on the Well. Not on Webb.Net. Perhaps we are the ones we are waiting for.

Always nice to be your own source of knowledge and inspiration... I personally can't comment on my own abiity to enlighten myself though...

Research is what I do when I don't know what I'm doing. I do a lot of research. :)

*laugh*

I didn't graduate from Utne, thank goddess. I dropped out. (Or was I drop-kicked?)

heh

I cam across this site by accident..I am based in London, England...can anyone tell me what the spring is about, how it came to be etc.? David Barry barr361@aol.com

The Spring came about around ten years ago to fulfill a need for a conferencing system that would run on a UNIX shell and on the web. It was one of the very first Internet discussion sites. It has become home to many special interest groups through the years and is open to all forms of new conversation and discussion. Though Austin, Texas based it has a wide International following and is populated mostly by women who inhabit the 'drool' conference and who check in our our sister sites, austen.com and firth.com. What are your interests and what would you like to see in a site like this?