Online Communities Chat Announcement

Thu Mar 16 06:23:30 PST 2000

The following announcement has (I gather) been posted on many internet lists.  I copied this from the OnLine Facilitation Group at eGroups.com, where it was posted by Nancy White, whose coordinates appear at the end of the announcement.

I know from reaction I have received before about technology support for Open Space, that others in this OS Forum are interested in this subject area.  I would encourage all to think about using internet technology at least as a channel to publish the results of Open Space meetings and also to extend and continue the discussion  and action planning aspects.  You may find it revealing just to read the bios of the expert participants in the announcement below -- gives you an idea of just how far facilitation in an online envroinment has been taken, and how behaviours and communication differ in this environment than in live or traditional media.

Cheers,

Patrick McAuley

Guelph, Canada

> From MANY lists! 
> 
> From: Suler sule- at voicenet.com
> 
> BEHAVIOR ONLINE (http://www.behavior.net) would like to invite you to
> attend a panel discussion entitled:
> 
> "DEVELOPING ONLINE COMMUNITIES"
> Saturday, March 25, 4:00-5:00 pm Eastern US time (Universal/Greenwich
Time: 21)
> Behavior Online (chat login)
> http://www.behavior.net/chat
> 
> In this meeting a panel of internet experts will discuss a series of
> questions about developing online communities that will be posed to
> them by a moderator. After the panel discussion, the meeting will be
> opened up to questions and comments from the audience. Some of the
> issues to be explored will include:
> 
> - 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
> 
> The program for the meeting is located at
> http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/bolchatcom.html
> 
> The panel discussion will begin at 4:00pm (Eastern US time). You are
> welcome to come early - and stay after the hour - to talk with
> colleagues. During the panel discussion, please refrain from sending
> public messages. You are welcome to "whisper" (send private messages)
> to other attenders, but keep in mind that if you whisper to someone,
> the chat program places a series of dots next to your name. You will
> not see the dots, but other users will. After the panel discussion,
> when the meeting is opened up to questions and comments from the
> audience, indicate that you want to speak by typing the message
> "hand." Questions will be taken in the order of hands raised. "(p)"
> will appear after the name of the panelists. Please do not send
> private messages to them during the panel discussion.
> 
> 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), and Tools 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-Philoso- phy, 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 psycho- logy 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
> several 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
> 

Nancy White   ~   Full Circle Associates   ~  206-517-4754  
http://www.fullcirc.com  and  http://www.onlinefacilitation.com

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