As I wrote at the end of yesterday’s post, I had barely got off the phone with a reporter from the New York Post when I looked again at the provisional Ning site I’d put up. I was astonished: there were already 10 people waiting to get in, and there wasn’t even a site.

Ning is powerful and easy to use: within a half hour, I had what I called Park Slope Kids & Parents—or PSKids for short—up and running. Now, just 36 hours later, there are 60 new users.

Meanwhile, two new listservs have come online to replace the soon-to-be-$25/year Park Slope Parents. Both, unsurprisingly, are Yahoo! Groups, just like the original Park Slope Parents. For both, their raison d’etre is the fee: they don’t want to pay it even though they obviously believe moderators are at very least needed.  One of the groups theotherparkslopeparents already has moderation and rules in place; the other, FreeParkSlopeParents, is getting there.

Listservs: powerful, simple—and weak

From the start, my reaction was not only to the fee but to the very form of a listserv. Listservs are decent for  connecting in real time with a large group of people, but they have obvious problems. Read as individual postings, they clog up your mailbox with each reply while as a digest, they become insufferably long, forcing users to read or skim the entire contents to reach an individual post or reply. Since they are plain text, they also eliminate the possibility of photos and videos—the only connection outside the senders is via html links, and those are by and large copy-pasted.

I realized that a good part of my disinterest in PSP had to do with it being a listserv. With my kids (twin boys) now four years old, I’ve become more confident as a parent, and haven’t felt like skimming every posting to find the nugget of neighborhood news I need. I needed a threaded solution, and moreover, more interaction than ASCII affords. With a list, there’s the list and then there’s face-to-face contact, and not much in-between. My experience with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., have convinced me that I really want more from the communities I belong to. I want to meet and learn from other parents, not just read their occasional messages. I want relationships. I want to create subgroups without leaving the community (French speakers or Greenmarket chefs!) I want to post pictures of stuff to sell or videos from the last Dan Zanes show. I want to chat in real time with other parents struggling through the pre-K lottery situation.

As I’ve said in other posts, I don’t believe these relationships need to be moderated; in my 20 years working in digital community, moderators have seemed essential only in commercial contexts. In self-organizing communities, the community is what matters, and moderation is really just an outgrowth of membership, culture, and the passions of the folks who are there in the first place. Self-assembly is self-policing, if you do it right.

But what does right mean here? There’s no guidebook to community that reckons how various cms and software packages apply their “opinions” to user interaction. None that tell you how to engage and irritate the user base so they’ll post. The recipe is in the relationships that pre-exist, covertly and overtly. The foundational days of electronic community in that respect resemble almost any other ecosystem of relationships, with hidden (sometimes not so hidden) hierarchies, relationships, and different layers of followership and leadership. I can’t figure out whether listservs flatten or exaggerate this hierarchy and these relationships; likewise, I don’t know what Ning will do to them.

However I can tell you that Ning seems well suited to the task at hand, replaced PSP. Ning has threaded discussion groups and you can set your mail options to get just the content you want whenever you want it. If you want to read and reply to all topics and all readers, you can do that; if you want to read just things about 4 year olds or high schools or selling cars, you can do just that. Ning has live chat and “friend groups,” blogs and photos and videos, and even a shared calendar, so you don’t miss a thing. Ultimately, Ning is closer to  Facebook than a listserv: you only see and read what you want to; you post photos and videos; you blog and add status reports; you have real time chats and make small “friend groups,” etc. Getting the day’s email is just a part of it. How this plays out in user interaction and behavior is another question, but if Facebook is any guide, it does seem to be relatively self-policing.

Fragmentation is annoying. We now have three groups—together nearly 200 people—but there’s a long way between these 200 dissenters and the 6000 (give or take a few thousand) who are part of the PSP listserv. What surprises me in the end is the strength of listservs—as well as the opinions they create among their users. I can’t predict what will happen to the 6000 when the fee starts. Will they go to another listserv, or will they, like me, look for a different solution, a different kind of community? The only thing I know for certain is that I’m not in charge.

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Tagged: Ning, Online Communities, Social network

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