Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Online Communities and Meeting Virtual Colleagues in Person for the First Time

This morning I participated in a panel session tackling the role of online communities. Moderated by Tony Streit of YouthLearn, the 90-minute session was an engaging discussion about strategies to develop online communities, as well as emerging Internet tools that may be of benefit to them.

Dan Schackman of CTCNet began the session by talking about the evolution of the CTCNet email list, as well as the creation of geographically-based forums that focus on particular cities or regions. Many of the people in the audience were members of the list, and Dan received high praise from one participant for the quality of discussions and moderating. I followed Dan with a presentation on my WWWEDU discussion list and the Digital Divide Network, talking about the challenges and opportunities for integrating email-based discussions with Web-based tools. I gave a preview of the new version of the Digital Divide Network, which we hope to launch in the early fall. The new site will feature a variety of publishing and networking tools, giving users the ability to create their own blogs, discussion forums and shared calendars. I then gave a demonstration of the youth activism network TakingITGlobal.org and some of the community tools they’ve built into their website.

After a presentation about YouthLearn and its current experiments with RSS feeds and blogs, I was surprised to discover that Karen Higgs from APC was in the audience. Karen, who’s based in Uruguay, introduced herself and offered to talk about APC’s new online content management system that allows nonprofit groups around the world to manage their own websites and seamlessly share content with each other. I’d known Karen online for a long time but had never met her in person, so meeting her turned into an appropriate demonstration of how online personal contacts often lead to in-person contacts.

Before we knew it, our 90 minutes was up, and the audience headed out to get lunch. Ideally we probably could have used a full two hours for the presentation, but the time we had was just enough to begin an engaging conversation over the role of online community tools by CTCs and other neighborhood organizations involved in the telecenters movement.... -andy