Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
Common Craft - Online Community Strategies: What is an Online Community?.  I feel comfortably at-home wandering around this site.  Here's a great thought-starter: Online communities are “communities” first and “online” second.  I think there is more to be considered here about how communities (or circles or any of the other mappings) are overlays and they are also dynamic and ad hoc.  The early groupware/teamware thrust seemed to allow for this in terms of teams coming and going and dispersing when the particular purpose for being glued together had been fulfilled.  I admire the bottom up, communities first idea.  In terms of growing social communities, I think the participants cause them and not the software. Though software might encourage engagement that was seen as too difficult before. And we should remember a key lesson for personal computing: people who don't balance their check book are not likely to balance it on-line either. Some communities can only be forged on-line, because of geography or accessibility, and that is a deeper exploration than I have little space for in this margin.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 08:06:29 AM