A Professional Meeting at
Behavior Online (http://www.behavior.net)
Developing Online Communities
Saturday, March 25, 4:00-5:00 pm Eastern US time (Universal/Greenwich Time: 21)
chat login: http://www.behavior.net/chat
Moderator: John Suler, Ph.D.
- Why create an online community?
- The do's and dont's of developing one
- Establishing the ideology and purpose of the community
- Structuring the population and communication infrastructure
- Dealing with the struggles and recognizing the triumphs
- Understanding the life cycle of the community
We strongly recommend that you visit Behavior Online ahead of time and test out the chat software (http://www.behavior.net/chat). For this meeting, we will be using the chat software "FreeChat." Read the help page. It's easy to understand. There are some disadvantages to FreeChat as compared to other chat programs, but it requires no downloads, is easy to use, and is stable across many platforms. During the meeting, if you wish to see new messages as quickly as possible, set refresh to 5 and click on the refresh button often. If this frequent refresh is hard on your eyes, set refresh to a longer period (20, 40) and use the refresh button sparingly. Note that new messages since the last refresh appear in a different color at the top of the screen.
THE PANELISTS:
ROBIN HAMMAN, an American now living in the UK, Robin Hamman has been building online communities since 1985 when he started a private Bulletin Board Service (BBS) on his Apple IIe so that his friends could download games and have online discussions. In 1995 he began to formally study online communities while working on his Master's degree in Sociology at the University of Essex. Since then, he has completed his MPhil in Communication Studies (Liverpool, 1999) and has begun working on his PhD project at the Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster. His project, an online community for people working in the London digital media industry, has received sponsorship from a large trade union, an EU funded think tank, and several corporations with commercial interests. Over the past five years, Robin has published articles in a number of periodicals, journals, and edited collections. He has been interviewed about his work by journalists in nearly a dozen countries. He has also been a freelance internet consultant and, since August '99, has worked as a communities producer at BBC Online (www.bbc.co.uk/gettalking). In his spare time, Robin edits a webzine called Cybersociology (www.cybersociology.com) and has moderated it's 750 member email list.
HOWARD RHEINGOLD is a leading expert on internet history, culture, and community. His books include The Virtual Community (HarperCollins 1994, MIT Press 2000),Virtual Reality (Touchstone 1993), andTools for Thought (Simon & Schuster, 1985, MIT Press 2000). He is Founder of Electric Minds (named by Time magazine one of the ten best web sites of 1996); one of the creators and former founding Executive Editor of HotWired (the online World Wide Web multimedia publication of Wired Ventures); Editor in Chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (HarperCollins 1994); former "Tomorrow" columnist for the San Francisco Examiner; and founder and host of the Brainstorms online community. His other books include Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind, They Have a Word For It, Higher Creativity (with Willis Harman), The Cognitive Connection (with Howard Levine), and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (with Stephen LaBerge). Rheingold's books are translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish. His web site is located at http://www.rheingold.com
ALAN SONDHEIM is a writer, teacher, videomaker, and cyberspace theorist who comoderates four email lists, Cybermind, Fiction-of-Philosophy, Cyberculture, and E-conf (electronic conferencing), on the Internet. For the past several years, Sondheim has been working on dynamic webpages and a long Internet Text, a continuous meditation on the philosophy and psychology of cyberspace. Parts of this have been published in online and offline venues, including Nettime's Readme (Autonomedia). Sondheim was the second Virtual Writer-in-Residence for the trAce Online Writing Community, originating from Nottingham Trent University, England. In 1996, Sondheim edited Being On Line, Net Subjectivity, for Lusitania Press, guest-edited an issue of Art Papers on Future Culture, and edited issue #120 of New Observations on Cultures of Cyberspace. His other books include Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America (Dutton, 1977) and Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988). His current project, the Internet Text, is available on the World Wide Web.
JOHN SULER, Ph.D., (moderator for the panel) is Professor of Psychology at Rider University and a practicing clinical psychologist. His online hypertext book The Psychology of Cyberspace describes the results of his ongoing research on how individuals and groups behave in cyberspace. His work has been translated into seven languages and has been reported by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the Chicago Sun Times, CNN, MSNBC, the APA Monitor, NBC Nightly News, US News and World Report, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is consulting editor for Behavior Online, the Journal of Virtual Environments, the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior, and the Contemporary Media Forum for The Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis. He is a founding member and on the executive board of the International Society for Mental Health Online, where he also created and moderates an online clinical group devoted to case studies of psychotherapy that involve the internet. He also created and facilitates the BOL forum The Psychology of Cyberspace and an e-mail group devoted to the study of how cyberspace and in-person lifestyles affect each other. John's other web projects include the Teaching Clinical Psychology and the award winning Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors web sites.
Transcripts of previous Behavior Online chat meetings are available at
http://www.behavior.net/chatevents/index.html