Managing Virtual Communities: Time to Turn to the Whetstone?

Abstract

The choice of the game ‘Paper Scissors Stone’ as the guiding title of this year's BILETA conference was an interesting one. Particularly, when connected to the consideration of politics, business law and changing modes of commerce. The game is one where an arbitrary set of rules has predetermined either a draw or more often a victory between otherwise unrelated items. Why should ‘paper covers stone’ result in the triumph of paper? Similarly if we follow this line of thought into the arena of virtual communities why should the increasingly commercial atmosphere of the Internet alter the formation and maintenance of online communities? Thus, we must be wary of assumptions imbedded in the language we use to describe and discuss phenomena, after all Chomsky has taught us that our thought processes are constrained by our language; that our conceptualisations are limited to those that we have the language to express.¹

Notes

1 N Chomsky ‘Language and mind’, 3rd edn, CUP, Cambridge, 2006.

2 Functionally, the Internet is an international network of computer networks—a network of networks—that allows the transmission of digital information among them. Various software applications around which communities have coalesced (including ‘Usenet’, and ‘MUDs’) have been built employing this functionality.

3 H Rheingold, The Virtual Community, p 5, Minerva, London, 1994.

4 Ibid, p 289.

5 See D Harris The IRC Survival Guide: Talk to the World with Internet Relay Chat, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, London, 1995.

6 See for example the LiveJournal agreement at http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos.bml

7 Although somewhat beyond the scope of this paper there is growing anecdotal evidence that many users have now simply become blind to End User License Agreements (EULAs) and other click agreements and do not read them. See http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20050223/1745244_F.shtml

8 A document is available in the LambdaMOO virtual library called ‘LambdaMOO takes a new direction’, which describes the transition. See http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.html

9 See J Smith ‘FAQ: basic information about MUDs and mudding’, available at http://www.mudconnect.com/mudfaq/mudfaq-p1.html at para 1.35.

10 D G Post ‘Anarchy, state, and the Internet: an essay on law-making in cyberspace’, Journal of Online Law. p 3, para 23, 1995.

11 J Dibbell ‘A rape in cyberspace—or how an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society’, The Village Voice 21 December 1993, pp 36–42. Also available at ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/MOO/papers/Village/Voice.txt

12 D Spender Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, p 196, Spinifex, Canada, 1995.

13 J Preece Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons, 2000.

14 S Neumann and K Barzilai-Nahon ‘Bounded in cyberspace: an empirical model of self-regulation in virtual communities’, in Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2005), IEEE Publication, Hawaii, January, p 5, 2005.

15 Dibbell, op cit, note 11.

16 By this I mean that there has been a certain degree of protection from liability extended to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the basis that they are a mere conduit of information (for example in the Electronic Commerce Directive). This would be lost if they began to take a more active role in selecting messages for transmission, deletion, etc.

17 E Ostrom Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

18 M Godwin ‘Nine principles for making virtual communities work’, Wired 2.06 (June), pp 72–73, 1995. Available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.06/vc.principles.html

19 H Rheingold ‘The art of hosting good conversation online’, available at http://www.rheingold.com/texts/artonlinehost.html

20 Op cit, note 18.

21 The legality of cancelling messages by ‘Cancelmoose [tm]’ was the subject of a very interesting discussion on the Cyberia-L listserv in late 1995.

22 L Himelstein ‘Law and order in cyberspace’, Business Week 4 December 1995.

23 R Vadon ‘Media futures: anarchists make the best police—self regulation is the way to stop offensive material travelling on the Internet’, Financial Times 29 May 1995, p 11.

24 Extracts from transcript of panel discussion on ABC radio Australia (2CH) 13∶05 18 April 1995. Comments are by Karl Auer. Quoted in T Maltz ‘Customary law and power in Internet communities’, available at http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue1/custom.html

25 See the Panels homepage at http://www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk/