David Woolley (mailto://drwool@well.com) Fri Apr 30 '99 I recently created a bibliography of books about online community, virtual teams, and cyberculture. I haven't tried to comprehensively cover everything about this subject because that would just be too much; rather I've focused mainly on books that would interest people who either want to build an online community or use online conferencing as a tool for collaborative workgroups. I'd appreciate comments and suggestions. http://thinkofit.com/webconf/wcbooks.htm

It's an excellent resource, David. Thank you.

What online vc's have you experienced or heard about, Barry?

I joined The Well in 1992 and still participate there. I joined E-Minds shortly after it was founded. The site overloaded my older, slower machines, so I didn't visit very often. In the meantime, it's changed hands and been revamped twice. I now visit it more often. I joined Cafe Utne a few years ago and participated until last summer, when the system manager summarily ejected me. I joined Brainstorms and participated there for a while until my detractors from Cafe Utne followed me there and created a ruckus. Whereupon Howard canceled my account. I joined CoIL (Community Intelligence Labs) and participated there until the site discontinued its public forums. The ones I had been active in moved to CommunityWare (the same site that hosted E-Minds). CommunityWare is now Webb Net. I joined Netscape's Forums, but they too, were recently scaled back. I participate in a few Yahoo Clubs, but I frankly despise their software. It only shows one post at a time, so there is no context, and it takes anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute to load a page. It's virtually impossible to catch up if one is more than a few days behind in a busy club. I installed Motet on a server in the Community Outreach Lab at U-Mass Lowell for their Flowering City Forum, and used it extensively. But that site is dark for the summer, as the lone professor who runs the C-Lab found it was more than he could handle with his limited budget and staffing. The MuseNet-K12 site which I launched in 1990 is still in operation. It runs a Muse, but does not yet have conferencing software like YAPP or Motet. I may install Motet on it, if we can raise the $500 it costs for a license. I'd prefer to install Motet so that we can revive the conferences from the C-Lab at U-Mass. As far as conferencing software goes, I like Motet and Engaged. Front Porch isn't bad, but it's slow. On the other hand, Front Porch has a decent search engine.

Feel free to start a conference here for your own purposes if you like Barry. It's been done a lot. And you don't have to fear persecution, though I'm sure you'll get poked and jabbed a bit. It looks like only a few conferencing systems have "staying power" and it looks like some of these sytems had too lofty expectations. We're small, but we've managed to stick around as a volunteer system. You know that old Grateful Dead song lyric "Wherever he goes the people all complain" may have been a reference to the hippie guru Stephen Gaskin whose style offended some but who was one of the great communicators and thinkers of our generation. Is that syndrome perhaps tagging you some? And perhaps some of those systems goals were too "pie in the sky"?

I'm not familiar with Stephen Gaskin, so I can't say whether his model resembles mine. My style is heavily laden with logic, which evidently annoys some people, who prefer emotional free associations without any scientifically supportable cause and effect linkages. I suspect the complaints are disingenuous and thinly disguised attempts to goad me into solving other peoples' long-suffering neuroses. Occasionally I manage to do that, which is why I harbor that theory. Do I have license to start a whole conference here? Or is that something the site administrator has to do?

I can do it, or can do it, under your guidance. Just let us know what name you call it (prerable one short as possible word) and then we can set you up as host. You can have a shell account if you want one.

It would be The Orenda Project. I don't think I need a shell account, unless that is necessary for some maintenance functions that can't be done via the Web interface. If Moonbeam (Nan Williams) has registered, she would be my co-host. Nan and I are writing a book together, and we share respsonsibilities on all our community networking activities. None of the screens I've been on so far seem to have a Create Conference button. Perhaps that is an Admin function? Motet was like that. Only the Motet Admin could create a new conference. I'm also waiting for Nan to show up here. She said she logged in yesterday, but didn't get a posting box. I was unable to figure out why not. Once Nan is here, we will invite the others from the Orenda Project to meet us.

I'm here now! :) Love the software -- it doesn't overload my laptop and I can breeze along at an almost snappy pace. What a delight!

Greetings David. Just got here myself. Is this your software, or are you just hanging out here as well. At first glance it seems fine. A little spoiled by Motet but then I know how to use all of the features there. I'm in full agreement with Barry on Yahoo. This one post at a time, slow loading, and you can't read offline. Just didn't have the patience for it. Though I like the concept of a threaded mode, I don't see why you can't have both in one. Click of a button and it pops into threaded mode. I'm a big fan of outliner mode myself. Back in the summer of '89 I had a prototype for a distributed hypertext system based on an outline format. Outline was the primary organizational mode but it contained links as well. Collapsable headings that retained memory of the underlying shape and I had it about 6 years before MicroCrap came out with it. It was a heady time the first time I visualized the web and thought that it was my idea. Sigh. The one that got away. Is this whole site fairly new? I'll probably check in here once every few days for awhile. Catch you later.

I can set you up a conference entitled Orenda because the conference name can't have any spaces in it...and setting the two of you up as hosts would be no problem, either...would you want it to be a private conference? and as to the maintenance, you can do most of it from the web and ask Terry or I to do the rest, or like Terry said, we can set you up a shell account... and welcome, Nan and Robert!

We're not that new. We just had our 10th anniversery last March 20th, and we've been on the web for 5 years now.

"Orenda" sounds fine! I guess it wouldn't hurt to have a shell account, if there are some maintenance tasks that are more easily accomplished that way. On Motet, since there wasn't a search feature, I occasionally had to "grep" for stuff that I had lost track of. Orenda would be a social contract conference, so perhaps it should be private, and we can use topic #20 in VC to invite people in. Is it possible to change between public and private, the way it is on Motet?

You can have a private and a public conference and you can change them any time if you want. I emailed you info on your shell account to your well email address earlier today. You need to set your password and run webuser.

Thanks!