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Community Networks and Websites?
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?"
The town of Arlington MA has been online for many years now in the form of a community mailing list and adjuct web sites. The mailing list, of which I have been a member since 1998, serves several purposes: community Q&A, a notice board, and a place to vent on general topics of relevance. The forum is pretty self-regulating in the old usenet tradition, but there is a moderator to handle housekeeping and extreme problems.
}#q NO CARRIER
one way might be to start a LETS, like the kind in victoria.
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.
I work for a local community network. I'll admit, it's a rather small non-profit operation with a 'staff' of about 10 people that meet every several months. The main feature is the forum board in which people sound off about anything and everything around town. Slashdot it if you really care.
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.
Free Mac Mini
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.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
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)
Free Mac Mini
We then started a community website for Indian's in Hong Kong on 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
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.
I'm the Technical Director/CTO for a large sports-based web forum located at http://forums.fanhome.com
:) But don't confuse 'usable' with 'simplest'. The technologies you use can't be crap. :) No one likes reading Times New Roman 10pt. for your entire site. Font tags can be your friend!
:)
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!
Thanks,
--
Matt
This may not be an insightful post to anyone, but I thought it was so great of a coincidence that I had to post a comment.
/. or via email (fivepanATyahooDOTcom -- you know how it is).
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
Here are assorted Web sites of members of the Community Technology Centers Network (CTCNet). And there's a complete directory of the Network's 650+ member organizations at a href=http://www2.ctcnet.org/ctc.asp">http://www 2.ctcnet.org/ctc.asp Most of those centers would love to get more volunteers with good tech skills since their budgets are usually pretty tight. Some are full-fledged community networks, others mainly provide skills-building opportunities for people in the neighborhood. -S.
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.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
http://bogr46qdy22tc.bc.hsia.telus.net:9000/networ kp/
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.
Having read all the (on topic) posts on this topic I find myself wanting to describe the website I am building for my community. I live in a co-operative housing community of approximately 180 residences in the middle of a large city. Currently there is no online presence for the community other than a single page advertising its existence on its parent associations website.
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.
I live in a predominantly rural area, and we have a community network that does a pretty good job of providing an internet-based tie for the community. The network is run by a non-profit organization and is funded primarily by selling internet access and web hosting to local individuals and businesses.
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.
I'm actually working on a business/service that aims to do just this. It's an entertainment guide aimed at teens here in the Phoenix area, but it's also designed to build a community and help foster the community offline as well as online. The point of the site is to help people find things that help them get off their butts and go have fun with other people in their community.
/.-ing definately won't be good for it's health.
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.
Trust me.... Literacy and marketing do not mix well.
One group of people you might want to talk to about funding/providing content for would be your local newspaper if you have one. A community website shares many of the same functions as a daily local paper. Community features such as bulletin boards and chat servers could be provided either with a paper subscription or by a small monthly (or yearly) access fee. It might be a local community blog. News articles could be discussed on the forums or in the chat rooms. It might even be pretty useful to have some method of talking to your neighbors about some local bit of news. An article complaining about potholes in the road could spark enough discussions and whatnot that could lead to someone actually fixing the holes in the road.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I started an online community for Purdue University students in late 1997. Going on our fifth year, I'm frequently asked if I would do it all again. I'd like to think not. Using slashcode has certainly allowed me to focus time and money elsewhere. Our target audience is small, operating budget non-existent with page views in the 300 thousands per month. When the board of trustees wants your domain, it's tempting to just give up at times. The $5 in advertising revenue certainly doesn't make up for the bandwidth. So, would I do it again? I'm a geek, enough said.
Check out the City Stories website-- a weblogging community of local events and culture.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
While I don't know if such efforts are successful or not, the OpenACS project I lead is directly oriented to this space (and other common-interest communities).
... much can be done by dedication, knowlege, and persistence.
I'd say that thus far such communities most naturally grow around subjects of global interest (such as 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
The best other examples of working online communities are the numerous chamber of commerces across the country. These are usually funded by businesses, and do a great deal to keep business to business and business to consumer activity working. I know they usually don't have chat rooms, but often have good directories and calendars. I've been working on several chamber related sites. The sites don't generate a great deal of online activity, but generate a great deal of buzz in the business community.
Everybody thinks they know what their community wants/needs. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not.
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.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Derek Powazek, creator of Fray, Kvetch, and others, wrote an excellent book on the subject: Design for Community.
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.
Kevin Fox
I did not read all the comments yet, but I did not found the word wiki in them... This is a powerful technology for building something together. It is sometimes difficult to keep the structure sound but some are used with success in wireless community networks seattlewireless is one, wireless-fr is another one (in french). General info about wikis can be found on Google directory/Wiki A lot of implementations now exist (I prefer phpwiki), the original one is on c2.com Some of them, like TuxScreen allow you to protect modifs with a login.
I just checked out neighborspace.com (the 'ghosttown' mentioned). It looks like it's just a big clunky bulletin board system, nothing else. It's webX, I think, which wasn't cheap when I looked at it years ago (probably when neighborspace.com started).
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.
creation science book
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 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 from Yahoogroups in part because of their marketing/privacy shift.
We have a wealth of experience and articles available on my web site.
Steven Clift
http://www.publicus.net http://www.opengroups.org
CCN
In the specific area of online discussions in local communities we need your advice. Related discussions on this has occured on the Democracies Online Code Network e-mail list 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 with additional archives using Mail-Archive. (We are moving our last few lists off Yahoogroups.)
Basic web pages with forum information, hundreds of Minnesota-specific political links, and special election/candidate link directories.
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, Mhonarc 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 ....
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 do people recommend?
If you actually read this far, you should join the DO-CODE e-mail list that I mentioned above.
Cheers, Steven Clift
http://www.publicus.net http://www.opengroups.org
We've been having a hard time over at seattlewireless, but we are making good progress. We have quite a dynamic group - -From business people, geeks, 'users', and other wireless groups asking questions. As of this point, we have a bunch of 'DXnodes' (nodes offering 'hotspot' internet), a few point 2 point links up. We should be getting 3-4 more point 2 point links up in the next two weeks. If you are interested in wireless, checkout our website:
http://www.seattlewireless.net
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!