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janc
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Hosting Electric Minds?
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Dec 30 04:33 UTC 2000 |
I just wandered around to E-Minds for the first time in a year or so.
The summarized history of E-Minds: In the beginning Marcus wrote Picospan
for M-Net, and then sold the rights to NETI who used it to launch a for-profit
conferencing system called Arbornet, which failed to make money and eventually
became a non-profit and merged with M-Net. NETI tried again with a system
in San Francisco called The Well, which succeeded pretty darn well. One of
many large mouths on The Well was Howard Rheingold who wrote the book on
Virtual Communities based on his Well experiences and then convinced some
venture capitalists that a new free virtual community on the web would be a
great way to make money, and started "Electric Minds", with a Well-like
culture, a big media splash, and pretty graphics. Curiously enough there
didn't seem to be any money to be made in free virtual communities, so the
money dried up and the doors were closed. Except during it's brief glorious
career, while failing to make money, Electric Minds succeeded in making
community. The users wanted it to continue to exist, and so found a way for
it to happen. The name, some of the pretty graphics, and the conferences
moved over to a service named communityware which seems to have morphed into
something else since I last looked, but still exists, and still has a decent
sized group of active users.
So I wandered over there today, just at random, and got a message from the
management popping up that says "Electric Minds will be turned off on January
31, 2001". Apparantly someone else noticed that they weren't making any
money, and therefore didn't deserve to exist. This news flash came through
just a few days ago. Folks there are scrambling looking for a new home, and
furiously backing up their conferences to their own computers.
So here's my idea - not really discussed with anyone there yet: maybe Grex
could host them. They probably wouldn't earn us any money either, but since
when do we care?
They're used to a conferencing system very similar to Backtalk. Some of them
are old Picospan users from the web. They have 13 conferences, with no name
overlap with our conferences (Commons,Playground,Electric People,Altered Minds,
Electric Learning,Mind Warp,Electric Words,MojoZone,Technos,360!,Barnraising,
Flash!,CommunityWare Comments). I could build a Backtalk interface that
looks a bit more like what they are used to, make them feel at home. It
shouldn't be too hard to import their archived conferences. I don't know
how many users they have, not above 40 really active ones, I'd guess. Grex
would hardly notice them among the 27,000 we've already got.
Probably they'd want some administrative control over their conferences.
Big deal. We make their people fairwitnesses, and promise to create any new
conferences they ask for (no big concession, since our policy is already to
make anybody any conference they ask for). The biggest minuses for them
would be that some of their users probably couldn't keep their old beloved
login names (with 27,000 users, a lot of names are taken, and "fattymoon" is
more than 8 characters - "fattymoo" just isn't the same), the slight
turgidness of our net connection, culture-clash issues, and loss of identity
issues. Only negatives I see for us are culture-clash issues, and I think
those would be at least as much positive as negative.
Actually, this is so little of a stretch for us, that they could, in theory,
move here without asking us - create their accounts, ask for their confernces,
and proceed with business. We wouldn't mind. The only non-standard
services they'd possibly be looking for is to import their old archived
conference items and text, provide some Eminds home pages, maybe a segregated
Eminds conference list for people who enter through an Eminds door (only
for Backtalk, not Picospan). Nothing terribly tricky.
Reactions?
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| 57 responses total. |
janc
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response 1 of 57:
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Dec 30 04:46 UTC 2000 |
Oh, Eminds is at http://www.minds.com/
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krj
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response 2 of 57:
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Dec 30 05:45 UTC 2000 |
Sounds like an excellent idea.
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swa
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response 3 of 57:
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Dec 30 06:12 UTC 2000 |
I concur. What is "Altered Minds" about? What is "360!" about? Sounds,
from that little knowledge, like an entertaining group.
It would be good to warn them that they will lose their pretty graphics,
though. I don't think I saw that on the list of minuses above.
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mdw
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response 4 of 57:
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Dec 30 07:11 UTC 2000 |
Another issue (possible negative) would be that DNS name, "minds.com",
and URLs containing it.
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scott
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response 5 of 57:
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Dec 30 08:00 UTC 2000 |
Sounds good to me.
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raven
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response 6 of 57:
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Dec 30 10:15 UTC 2000 |
Sounds good to me. I was a part of one of Howard Rheingolds conferencing
communites a couple of years back and I found that it was a creative
community with a very high level of discourse.
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mary
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response 7 of 57:
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Dec 30 13:49 UTC 2000 |
Wow, new people. Lovely.
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davel
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response 8 of 57:
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Dec 30 16:50 UTC 2000 |
Sounds good to me. As you say, except for importing existing material,
there's really nothing to stop any of them from doing it without help or
invitation; existing stuff could be imported a response at a time by a user,
but all would show as being by that user. Better to offer help in setting
up. The issues such as those Marcus and Sara mention probably will look
pretty minor if the alternative is having to close up completely, but that's
up to them.
Otherwise, what Mary said.
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keesan
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response 9 of 57:
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Dec 30 17:28 UTC 2000 |
That is awfully nice of Jan to put in the extra work to make them feel more
at home.
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janc
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response 10 of 57:
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Dec 30 17:35 UTC 2000 |
I'm not sure exactly what level of legal existance EMinds has. Don't know
if it is formally organized or exactly who the leaders there are. One seems
to be 'maddog' (AKA Harry Pike). Don't know if they are incorporated, but
my impression is that they have use of the name "Electric Minds" some of the
original graphics, and the minds.com domain name. I think that whatever
machines hosts the "minds.com" currently is not actually the one the
conferences run on. If it weren't appropriate to virtual host it on Grex,
I'm sure another machine could be found to host the front page and the
graphics. Might even be preferable. I certainly don't think they'd have
to lose their graphics. A machine to host those can definately be found.
I wouldn't really want to see the two communities amalgumate. I'd rather
keep the distinct identity, though some cross-fertilization would be great.
There are different degrees of independence that could be implemented.
Their conferences could be just 13 more conferences within our existing
conferencing systems, but with the menus (at least on the web interface)
making them appear separate (when you'd list conferences you'd see only
one set or the other, depending on which front door you came in by, but you'd
still be able to join the others by typing the name in the navigation box or
putting it on your hotlist or maybe bringing up a submenu.
Or for a more thorough separate, we could install a separate copy of Backtalk
that was configured not use Unix accounts (this is a standard backtalk
configuraation). Then it would be a whole isolated conferencing system,
not accessible via Picospan or from Grex accounts at all. You'd have to
create a separate EMinds account using a separate newuser page. You'd hardly
know the two were on the same host. This would obviously be a much bigger
departure from Grex's normal way of doing things and might require some actual
though about whether or not this is something we'd want to do. I'd think
probably, so long as it was somehow made clear that if you want EMinds to keep
existing or improve it's hardware platform, you'd want to think about donating
some change to Grex. (I'd vastly prefer handling the finances that way over
charging them some small regular fee for being hosted here).
What I've heard from EMinds people is "this is an interesting offer, if the
other options we are pursuing don't pan out we may be interested". I don't
know what their other options are.
A note for any EMinds people reading this: decisions on Grex are made
semi-consensually. Everyone who cares to discusses it in public (as in here),
if a consensus appears, the board ratifies it. If no consensus appears we
usually have a member referendum. If time gets short on a significant issue
the board may actually feel compelled to make a decision. So if the wave of
"sounds good to me" responses in this item continues, then you can consider
the offer solid. This mode of operation is odd, but it does mean that if you
come here, you'll never get another bolt-out-of-the-blue message that says
"you will be shut down in 30 days". Even if that happened, for $18 you could
buy the right to call a referendum on the issue that would be binding to the
board and cast one vote in that referendum.
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carson
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response 11 of 57:
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Dec 30 18:05 UTC 2000 |
(wow. this sounds like a good, community-minded thing for Grex to do
if we can.)
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janc
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response 12 of 57:
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Dec 30 18:43 UTC 2000 |
In my estimation, the odds of them taking this up on this offer are only
around one in ten. It has a lot of advantages for them, but my guess is that
it's not the feel they are looking for.
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eeyore
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response 13 of 57:
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Dec 30 19:01 UTC 2000 |
Plus, if we aren't something that they are used to, then they are probably
wondering where we would come up with this crazy idea. ;)
I think, though, that it's a good idea, if they are willing....New thoughts
are always welcome here. :)
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other
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response 14 of 57:
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Dec 31 01:20 UTC 2000 |
Some thoughts:
Obviously the difference between inviting the E-Minds folks to join Grex
and relocating their operation onto our system in one form or another is
quite significant in terms of the work required to implement the change.
If they are interested in pursuing this, it is important that we not
offer a level of service/support we cannot provide. We sould make sure
that we do not set a level of expectation we can't meet.
This basically means that Jan and whoever else would be doing the
implementation would have to get together with E-Minds and come up with
exactly what would happen.
What I'd ideally like to see happen is that some of these folks create
Grex accounts and check us out, and if they're interested, we offer
moving their conference archives here and making them available with
minimal additional software and/or configuration work first, and then
move from there to more advanced support.
My $0.02.
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mdw
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response 15 of 57:
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Dec 31 02:22 UTC 2000 |
Another issue over inviting the EMind folks here could well be copyright
issues and other policy matters. In the long run, these are certainly
all resolvable, one way or another. In the short run, the most likely
way this could come up is over copying any current EMinds conferences
onto grex. That's likely to be pretty close to mandatory if EMinds is
to have any sort of continuity. Another way this come come up is with
regard to our current response expunge policies.
The Well had a long-established policy that "users" owned their own
words. This is not surprising given that the well had a high percentage
of actual published authors, who actually felt that their online words
were valuable. We don't have that tradition here on grex, because few
of us are under any such illusions. It's very probable that EMinds has
continued the well tradition, considering their roots.
I definitely agree that if the EMinds folks are serious about moving to
grex, they should come check things out first.
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i
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response 16 of 57:
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Dec 31 03:16 UTC 2000 |
Any feel for how much disk space they'd need to move in, janc? We don't
have much extra space spinning, but we've got plenty of GB's on the shelf.
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janc
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response 17 of 57:
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Dec 31 04:52 UTC 2000 |
Some of them are talking about not moving old content to the new system, but
they seem to think for some reason that it would be difficult or impossible.
My guess would be that there would be little legal objection in moving the
old content to a new server - It'd still be in a context called EMinds, and
each response would still be surrounded by all the same original content.
It wouldn't be that much different from just changing the underlaying
hardware. There's a big difference between copying stuff into new contexts
and moving the whole system.
I have no sense of their disk space requirements. I believe we have a new
2Gig drive ready to plug in. We have some technical hurdles to jump if we
need more than that - our primary SCSI chain will be full. We have more
drives and some auxiliary SBUS SCSI controllers, but we'd have to figure out
how to get the extra controller working. If that's a problem, we can replace
the CDROM (which we never use) with another SCSI disk (this will require some
kernel reconfiguration), or we can spend a little money to buy some disks
bigger than 2G. We have a bottomless supply of 2G disk, and we prefer using
many small disks to a few big disks for performance reasons, but if getting
additional SCSI chains up turns out to be hard, then disk is still cheap.
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cmcgee
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response 18 of 57:
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Dec 31 15:47 UTC 2000 |
I'm interested in them being here. I'd prefer that they have conferences that
I can switch back and forth between by dialing into Grex. I don't want
graphics to be a barrier for me seeing their conferences. Are their
conferences set up so that I'd have a mess of HTML code in responses I'm
trying to read?
Sounds like a good idea to me and my second preference would be for them to
be separate, with different entryway. However, I'm less interested in that,
because the benefit to Grex is so extremely small. If they don't know we're
here, what's the point? Would they give is an ongoing ad on their home page
like we do arborweb.
I guess what I'm willing to trade is Grex volunteer work for an expanded
audience of conferencers. I'm not so sure I want to trade Grex volunteer
hours to be the quasi-commercial hosts of a different system.
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mdw
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response 19 of 57:
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Jan 1 01:45 UTC 2001 |
Transplanting a virtual community is kind of like transplanting a plant.
Even under ideal circumstances, there will be some "shock" to absorb
during the transference process. The more that changes, the more
"shock" there will be, and at some stage, the result isn't viable
anymore. Just where that point is depends a lot on the people involved
- and to make matters even more messy, it's not an all or nothing deal -
some people will get upset at almost any change, while others will stick
close through almost anything.
Moving content across will definitely lessen the amount of shock, by
providing for that much more continuity between the old system & new.
My impression is that EMinds probably preserves the same sort of
discussion/response paradigm as in Confer II and PicoSpan, in which case
it really shouldn't be much of a problem to transfer most of the content
across. However, if what they have is HTML with embedded graphics, that
is part of the *content* as opposed to being merely stylistic
decoration, then things become not nearly so straight-forward and some
loss of content is likely. If they can provide us with an approximate
copy of the data (ideally, a tar copy of the data files from the old
system - assuming the data is stored in files that we can process), it
should be possible to put that data on grex. Jan probably already has
an idea of what the EMinds softare is capable - and presumably the
EMinds folks know if they wrote the software themselves or got it from
someone else.
I think one question I'd have is whether they see themselves becoming
*part* of the grex community - or whether they see themselves retaining
their own separateness?
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steve
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response 20 of 57:
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Jan 1 02:59 UTC 2001 |
I think this is an excellent idea; I'd like to see us offer them
the usage of the conferencing systems we have here, and take it from
there. Perhaps the user base (or a part of it) will move over and
start using new conferences they ask for, or perhaps something else
might evelve. Either way, it would be an interesting thing to do.
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janc
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response 21 of 57:
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Jan 1 18:07 UTC 2001 |
I would certainly expect that they want to maintain a strong separate
identity. That's what we'd want to do if they were in our shoes. That
doesn't mean they'd be opposed to people drifting across the line. It's the
particular set of people, and the particular culture that has developed among
them that people value. That can't be preserved by just dumping it into
another system.
I think Grex's mission is to promote public-access virtual communities, and
not exclusively our own. Electric Minds is ad-free, requires no fees, and
gives accounts to all comers. So it's exactly the kind of thing we believe
in. It's very much the kind of thing that we exist to promote and support.
That it is a separate community is a good thing, not a bad thing. I don't
want Grex to grow to the size of AOL. We don't want to absorb our
"competition". We don't even want to compete with our "competition." We'd
like to see lots and lots of communities like Grex and Eminds prospering.
I think the biggest thing Grex has to contribute to a free virtual community
movement is the economic/organizational structure we've evolved. We've
figured out how to pay for and administer a virtual community in a communal
way, that gives the members of the community a substantial real voice in the
destiny of their community. Electric Minds has been buffeted around by
various corporate entities. Grex has the capacity to put an end to that.
Anyway, I'd think there should be at least this much autonomy:
- Eminds should have it's own home page, that would mention us only in
a limited way, like a link saying "hosted by Cyberspace Communications".
- The default web interface to the conferences should look different
from Grex's pages, at a minimum showing the Eminds logo, using their
terminology ("topics" instead of "items" etc). The "list of conferences"
("list of discussions" in their terminology) might include a link to
"Grex discussion" which would bring up Grex's conference list. Or not.
- Some set of one or more Eminds users should have administrative control
over their cluster of conferences - deciding which conferences should
be created or deleted, assigning hosts/fairwitnesses, etc. Who this
should be and how he/she/they would be chosen would be up to the
EMinds people.
- We'd retain responsibility and control of the hardware and software
configuration. If EMinds users want to influence that they'd have
to come to the Grex Co-op conference.
- We'd expect it to be made reasonably clear to EMinds users that Grex
is donating support to EMinds and that any donations from EMinds users
to Grex would be appreciated. However, as usual for Grex, our services
would not be contigent on actually recieving any money (except that if
nobody gives us any money we will die). We run on voluntary donations,
not fees. No aggressive fundraising efforts are expected or desired.
I don't know if they currently have any non-public conferences. I'm not
sure we could accomodate such a thing. We might suggest that a mailing
list be used if they want a private discussion area.
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janc
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response 22 of 57:
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Jan 1 18:10 UTC 2001 |
Their conferences are certainly more intensive than ours in their use of HTML.
In Backtalk, this should be no problem - it does support HTML in responses.
Backtalk automatically generates plain text versions of HTML responses for
Picospan users to look at. This process is imperfect and some loss of
information inevitable. 99% of the time is should not be an issue.
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janc
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response 23 of 57:
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Jan 1 18:21 UTC 2001 |
EMinds does not have their own software as far as I know. I think some other
company is currently running the conferences on their own proprietary software.
Looks like something running on a Microsoft platform, using active server
pages on top of Microsoft SQL, if I'm inferring correctly from the frequent
crash screens. That company looks like it is abandoning that entire end of
their business.
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other
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response 24 of 57:
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Jan 1 18:41 UTC 2001 |
What comes to mind is the following, primarily:
As a group, EMinds would have no mechanism for contributing to the
governance of CCI. As individuals, they could make membership donations
and become parts of the process, which may or may not make for some
unexpected changes in Grex and its operations, depending on the tastes
and interests of the members of the EMinds community.
In this case, EMinds would essentially be either a (fairly independent)
colony of Grex, without anything approaching the the level of self-
determination we Grexers would expect, or a new political force with the
power to divert resources from the grex entity to the EMinds entity.
It is definitely in the interest of Grex to support other VCs, but the
nuts and bolts of making it happen in this way present some potential
scenarios which are difficult to accept.
I have no doubts of the technical feasibility of providing a home for
EMinds on Grex, and I support the notion, but I am concerned that we
properly address the governance model under which such provision would
take place.
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