Face-to-Face v. Wired: community life @Meadowmont and Meadowmont.org

± future

"Whatever community is, it is not necessarily a conflict-free environment . . . Issues of governance only emerge from conflict. Norms that ought to be rules only become matters of serious discussion when they are transgressed." -- Howard Rheingold (p. 41 and 339)

Questions for the future
1. What administrative, decision-making and dispute-resolution processes emerge to manage the intranet?

2. Which decisions are contentious and which are not?

3. Over time, how does the intranet "community" displace or replace physical space community, reinforce or augment it, sit alongside but separate from it?

4. "Perhaps the public conviviality that Paris is famous for is the real thing that others seek, and for which they find only a substitute, a simulacrum, in virtual communities." The question: "Whether the communion kind of virtual community has the same potential in a place where people commune in the still-vital heart of their city, or whether the suburbanized, urban-decayed, paved, and malled environment of modern America is a necessary condition for the proliferation of virtual communities. Certainly that is the implication of the theories of the French philosopher and social critic Baudrillard, who sees electronic communication as a part of the whole web of hyperrealistic illusion we've turned to, in our technologically simulated flight from the breakdown in human communities." Rheingold (p. 236)

5. From Preece (p. 35), who at meadowmont.org will assume the special roles of "expert," "provocateur," "social conscience," "moderator," "mediator," among others?

6. Also from Preece, will the meadowmont.org community take over its own governance and administration (really)? How will the intranet evolve over time and to what extent will the residentinteractive.com interface permit or obstruct this evolution? Is it malleable enough even now in the initial stages to facilitate, encourage, or even inspire evolution?

 

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