ANN: group-forming list

Hi,

Just wanted to invite you to join the new 'Group Forming' mailing list.
It's being started by me (Eric Hanson) and Sebastien Paquet.  Here's the
topic area.

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?=20
* 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=20
  dynamics?
* How might the Semantic Web affect net-based communities?
* What existing and future technologies can facilitate the process of=20
  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/.

S=E9bastien 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 Seb and I 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

Sincerely,
Eric & Seb

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