[The newciv.org server was not receiving messages part of the day today. If you sent anything to me or to a list today and it bounced, you should be able to send it again now.]
Creating a virtual group or team requires, besides a reason to come together, some facilities to meet in. That is, a mailing list, a bulletin board or a chat room, or something like that.
We have some of these things on the servers that most of the NCN facilities are on. I.e. we have a bunch of mailing lists with different themes, we have some bulletin boards (forums, conferences) and we have two chat rooms.
My aim is to make it possible for you to create new spaces on this server to meet in in the future, for specific purposes. I mean, without the bottleneck of asking me first. And my intention is that these spaces would be seamlessly integrated with the member database.
However, in the meantime, let me mention a few places out on the net where you can freely set up facilities useful for a virtual group to meet in.
I just learned of MakeList!, a service by FindMail, at http://www.makelist.com/. They let you set up and manage your own e-mail mailing list. That is, a discussion group that takes place over e-mail. It looks very straightforward and removes some of the headaches typically connected with administering mailing lists, like dealing with bounced messages.
And then there are conferences, bulletin boards, or forums. Those terms essentially cover that you access a place through the web where people can post messages and others can answer them. That means you avoid having your e-mail inbox filled up and you can access the traffic in your own time.
CommunityWare at http://www.communityware.com/ lets you set up your own conference for a virtual community. A conference can be private, i.e. only for members who've been given the password, or it can be open to anybody. There's an assortment of nice features associated with this, including chat rooms, a shared whiteboard and more.
InterMix, created by NCN member Roger Eaton <rogereaton@earthlink.net>, at http://www.intermix.org/ lets you add open forums for discussion. InterMix has some nice features for filtering messages, in part based on how they've been rated by others.
Then there are chat rooms. They are useful for a scheduled meeting or for just hanging out in.
NCN member Brent Hunter <bhunter@the-park.com> runs The Park http://www.the-park.com/ It has many existing chat facilities and you can register and add your own chat room.
There are many other services that allow you to set up chat rooms, like Yahoo at http://chat.yahoo.com/ I don't really have an overview of them.
There's also stuff like ICQ, which is a program that lets you know when your friends are online and allows you to chat with them. http://www.icq.com/
And there are other kinds of media. If you have a video camera connected with your computer you can use a program like CU-SeeMe. http://cu-seeme.cornell.edu/ or http://www.whitepine.com/ A group of people can see each other at the same time and have a text chat, or, if you're lucky, audio. I have the setup for that, so if you want to try it, let me know.
And then there's virtual reality. The most impressive setup I know is ActiveWorlds. http://www.activeworlds.com/ It allows you to build your own buildings, you walk around with an artificial body, an "avatar", in a 3D space, and there's sound and music and you can chat with people. It only works in Windows unfortunately. If you try it out, a while ago I built an NCN Information center in AlphaWorld at coordinates 896N 814W 90. And Roan Carratu built an NCN Meeting Hall across the street.
So, there are lots of ways of meeting virtually.
Again, if you create a team or group or community, virtual or not, I invite you to have it listed as part of the NCN TeamNet.
- Flemming
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/ \------------------ Flemming A. Funch -------------------/ \
/ * \ New Civilization Network / Synchronicity Networks / * \
/ * * \ ffunch@newciv.org / * * \
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Dec 07 2000 - 23:22:12 PST