A collaborative workspace environment: experience of evaluation and selection in the Agora project

Gardner, Tracy A.; Russell, Rosemary

doi:10.1108/eb040662

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Levy (1999), in a special issue of the journal VINE devoted to virtual communities and library and information services, also argues that participation in virtual communities may become more common for information professionals. Other topics addressed in the same issue include: lis‐link, an electronic discussion forum for the library and information science (LIS) community in the U.K. (Williamson, 1999); approaches to the development of virtual communities (Nichols & Twidale, 1999); the use of collaborative workspace software (Gardner & Russell, 1999); electronic mail discussion lists (Reid, 1999); videoconferencing (de Cicco, 1999); teleworking (Cano, Hater, & Zapatero, 1999); and MUDS (Multi‐User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs Object Oriented) (Cook & Stanley, 1999).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community and virtual community

Ellis

Oldridge

Vasconcelos

2004

Annual Review Info Sci & Tec

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IntroductionAlthough groups have been interacting online since the 1970s, the notion of virtual community is relatively recent and has particular connotations (Turkle, 1995). Rheingold (1994, p. 5) defines virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." He traces the social origins of virtual community back to the development of the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) (Rheingold, 1993(Rheingold, ,1994. The WELL is an electronic virtual community covering a wide variety of subjects, including computers and communications; body, mind, and health; arts and recreation; and the popular music group the Grateful Dead. The WELL was created and maintained by an assortment of intellectuals, artists, and engineers (Hafner, 1997). Rheingold is part pioneer, part homesteader in the world of virtual community, and his work on the WELL documents many of the issues that arise repeatedly in discussions and writing on virtual community. Although he was not involved in setting up the WELL (it was created in 1985 by Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand), he was one of the very early users. As Rheingold points out, for pioneers, the WELL was a cultural experiment; in that sense, its 145 146 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology intellectual roots were in the counter culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as in the technological revolution brought about ten years later by the personal computer. The significance of this socio-technical revolution cannot be ignored, as Brand (quoted in Rheingold, 1993, p. 48) has remarked: "The personal computer revolutionaries were the counterculture." The early developers or pioneers espoused a libertarian, anti-authoritarian ethos reflecting their counter-cultural origins. More recently, interest in virtual communities has become widespread and has attracted the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplines-economics, sociology, communications, and ethnography-as well as business and government. Virtual community research has spawned relations with education, community networking, contemporary corporate culture, and information studies.The literature of virtual community begins with the attempt to justify the appropriation of the term community. Rheingold (1994) seeks to demonstrate the community features of electronic communication, to convince a skeptical world that online networks can foster social ties. He shows how people use electronic media to interact rather than to passively receive information. He is not primarily concerned with information transfer, but sees information as the currency that keeps community flowing. Although Rheingold does not downplay the importance of the WELL as a source of information, the most valuable element for Rheingold is the sense of community it engenders. For Cutler (19951, as for Rheingold, information "buys" community, but Cutler complains that information has...

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