Back in the 1990s, when I worked at UCS, I was involved in the publicising to (and ideally the migration of) users of a small BBS community, FORUM away from that system to alternatives - in this case Usenet, though I recall that another system had been proposed and langushed. As Jon lays out in the definitional entry there, it didn't go too well - while we in the provider side had a mandate to change the structure of communication and server utilization, but that doesn't mean you can mandate what people want to or will use to communicate (roll tape of self-organizing software in enterprises here). I'm still sorry I had to learn that lesson at the FORUM community's expense.
Imagine my echo of sadness when I read that the last of the Usenet systems at IU we promoted as a replacement is now being advertised as down to the decom knife on July 3rd. No more iu.* newsgroups. No more "TOO MUCH SIDEWALKS, I'VE GOT TOO MANY MONEY'.
Oh, the days.
Kibbitzing from afar (because really, who can resist), is groups.google.com a viable replacement? Why not promote any of the alternative services out there (like the one bundled with Panic's swell Unison) as well? I'm not saying IU should maintain trn or other text readers on their hosts (and where would they put them, now that Pine is gone?), but that alternatives beyond the web are out there - moreover local alternatives were part of the joy of FORUM, the iu.* newsgroups, freeform joys that I doubt a managed and shared IMAP mailbox quite promotes the free join/part and flow of information... Does Sakai solve some of these problems for an educational institution?
Or is, as the technopundits tell us, centralized communication heading toward a ecosystem death in (no longer so-) new environment of RSS/Atom feeds, trackbacks, weblogs and microsearches?
All the kibbitzing aside, I'm sure the boxes cost more to maintain (and despam and dejunk!) than their usage counts would warrant. History is built of these tactical decisions in aggregate.
Posted by esinclai at June 01, 2006 10:05 PM |
I had a long thoughtful response all typed up and then inadvertently blew it away.
I'm not going to reconstruct it, but the gist was that locally-based centralized communication, supplying a natural mix of social and utilitarian functions, works in a way that should be familiar to anyone interested in urban theory, etc.. The only virtual communities I've thoroughly and unreservedly enjoyed have been like that.
Oh, and I get the impression that "too much sidewalks" means something to you that's roughly similar to what it means to me. Sometimes I just think of those words and start grinning.
Posted by: A. on June 2, 2006 11:23 AMMan, I remember that meeting with all of the forumites. I felt like I was trying to instruct a room full of Mormons how to interanally shoot up freebase cocaine.
Posted by: jon konrath on June 7, 2006 09:03 AM"Too Much Sidewalks" was a notorious complaint by one person on the newsgroups, yes? And nobody could figure out what it meant. "I've got too many money" was not on the newsgroups, to tbe best of my knowledge, but it was kind of a private rejoinder, as in "Oh, yeah, well I've got..."
Posted by: AZ on June 15, 2006 02:34 PMSakai is not the kind of warm friendly
environment that people seek out to hang
out in, at least not in its current form.
I've seen at least nascent communities form
inside Drupal space, which you can make
as elaborate or as plain as you want. My
kid's school PTO just set up a site, we'll
see how that goes.
The local groups I hang out with tend to
be functioning with local multi-author
blogs and lots and lots of comments as the
main structure.