Here's the announcement for the list, which Eric Hanson and I wrote together. As I write this, a dozen people have already subscribed. I guess we're going to seriously start talking pretty soon. I think it's going to be an enjoyable ride.
"One thing that's exciting about the Internet environment is the ability to easily form new communities and connect with others who share common interests. In particular, it allows activists, thinkers, and other creative, change-oriented people to find one another, regroup, share information, collaborate and learn more easily.
Although we already see social clustering happening, we believe there is still room for improvement. It's difficult to create high-signal, lively groups around issues that are not (yet) very well known.
This mailing list will foster discussion about the process of net-based group forming. Some of the questions we'll explore are:
* How and why are communities born?
* What is the essence or ontology of a community? What variables vary from one community to another?
* How do communities grow? Why and how do people discover them and decide to participate in them?
* How does the size of the topic area a community centers around, and the way a community describes itself, affect the community and its dynamics?
* How might the Semantic Web affect net-based communities?
* What existing and future technologies can facilitate the process of social aggregation?
In the spirit of bootstrapping, we'd like to evolve this list itself into the tools we're going to experiment with. Especially interesting is the idea of the fragmentation of topic areas into multiple communities centered around highly specific focal points and ideas.
Eric started ShouldExist.org, an ideas bank collecting ideas about how to make the world a better place. He brainstorms about the future in his personal Wiki, http://www.aquameta.com/wiki/ and his personal homepage is at http://www.aquameta.com/~eric/.
Sébastien runs a weblog about the evolution of knowledge sharing and scholarly communication at http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/ and his personal homepage is at http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquetse/.
Though we have met only recently, we've found we share a lot of common interests and are looking forward to an active discussion of some tough questions about the future of community on the net. We hope you'll join us.
To subscribe, visit http://lists.aquameta.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/group-forming."
