Searching for community online
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Thursday
I start the evening by plugging in to the Community Connector at the University of Michigan (www.si.mich.edu/community/). This site, based at the university's School of Information, is dedicated to documenting, studying, and promoting community networks of all kinds. Doug Schuler, a founding member of the influential Seattle Community Network (www.scn.org), had recom- mended the Community Connector a few days earlier when I contacted him, via e-mail, to ask for some civic network starting points. He said the site is ''well tended and comprehensive.''
And so it is. The students at the Ann Arbor, Michigan, campus of the School of Information have collected and sorted community-networking projects into dozens of neat alphabetical categories: education, environ- ment, health, housing, jobs, social services, transportation, etc. Navigating through these well-organ-ized links, one can't help but be impressed by the sheer volume of community-related offerings on the Web.
Yet a different story emerges when I sort these resources according to location. Community-networking sites are wildly uneven in their distribution. One state will have four humming community Web sites, the neighboring states none. New York State, for example, has three lively community hubs, but none south of Albany. In Massachusetts, there are rich community sites in Gloucester and Lowell, but the Community Connector lists none in Springfield, Worcester, or Lawrence.
Doug Schuler had mentioned, in his e-mail, that it was important to get involved with one's local community and hook up with broader efforts by ''networking the networks.'' After navigating the Community Connector and the Association for Community Networking (bcn.boulder.co.us/afcn/index.html), it is clear to me that this ragtag collection of local sites is a long way from coalescing into a network. So the good news is: Individual civic networking sites can grow almost spontaneously, organically, from isolated pockets of interest, access, and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, that's also the bad news for those trying to weave together networks of networks.
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