You could find moderators of various lists (past and still existing) and get lots of narrative data about this sort of things. and then you could find the participants of those lists - narrow it down to a few lists of your interest though or you will be overwhelmed by the volume of what you get ;-) r

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for examples of virtual communities that gave bearth to other virtual communities. I mean that the members of one virtual community (a mailing-list for instance) decided to have two virtual communities instead of one. The first one is about a subject and the second one is about another subject (linked to the first one, more specific, for instance).

Have you ever heard of cases like this?

Many thanks.

Regards,

Emilie Marquois-Ogez

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Emilie Marquois-Ogez

Doctorante en informatique

France Telecom R&D 38-40, rue du Général Leclerc 92794 Issy-les-Moulineaux Cedex France

Equipes de recherche : - TECH/EASY/DIAG (France Telecom R&D) - Systèmes à objets coopératifs (IRIT - UT1)

Tel : +33 (01) 45 29 81 91 Fax : +33 (01) 45 29 69 26

Page Web : http://www.univ-tlse1.fr/ceriss/soc/perso/marquois/Emilie% 20MARQUOIS.html

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Dear Emilie, You could research the Usenet. Usenet consist of 143 widely distributed hierarchies with tens of thousands of different groups, nobody knows exactly how many because of the de-centralized allocation of them. Usenet started as one society with only a few groups and still shows signs of that, for example, we can talk about one netiquette. There are many common culturally historical developed norms and interpretations connected to the distinction Usenet/society. The Usenet people defines themselves as a we when talking about non users and when the normal way of communication is broken. This indicates that Usenet is one society, however, this society itself has differentiated into the hierarchies, the groups and their subgroups, subject pointers and threads. The groups have their own border of meaning differentiating them out from the general norms of Usenet and from the other groups. If the complexity of a newsgroup gets too high, e.g. if there are too many relevant topics, a new group form through a bifurcation. On the group level the FAQ is the guideline for good behaviour. The FAQ tells the history of the group and give laws for what to communicate about and how (in what tone). The regulation of the communication is, anyhow, much more complex than can be explained by laws presented in a FAQ. No individuals can determine the structure of the process of communication, only the processes of communication that runs through the structure can alter it. This happens in the process of acceptance and rejection of meaning proposals. The name of each newsgroup begins with the relevant main hierarchy, and terms of increasing specificity are added to this. A typical newsgroup name is alt.music. This could have been one newsgroup and historical seen it has been, but now it is just a second-level name in the hierarchy with 742 actual sub-groups, for instance, alt.music.blues with the three sub-groups: alt.music.blues.delta, alt.music.blues.Johnny-Whinter, and alt.music.blues.lexington-blues. There are about 150 different top-hierarchies each containing a number of second-level hierarchies that each potentially contains a number of sub-groups. The groups I have studied most are groups that communicate animal rights and motorcycles, but they are in Danish. The one about animals has separated out four subgroups e.g. about dogs, and the one about motorcycles has gone through a bifurcation into one about motorcycles and one about mopeds. The members of the first one still communicate in the mother group, while there are an antagonistic relation between the motorcycle folks and the moped folks. Regards Jesper Emilie MARQUOIS-OGEZ wrote:

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for examples of virtual communities that gave bearth to other virtual communities. I mean that the members of one virtual community (a mailing-list for instance) decided to have two virtual communities instead of one. The first one is about a subject and the second one is about another subject (linked to the first one, more specific, for instance).

Have you ever heard of cases like this?

Many thanks.

Regards,

Emilie Marquois-Ogez

----------------------------------------------

Emilie Marquois-Ogez

Doctorante en informatique

France Telecom R&D 38-40, rue du Général Leclerc 92794 Issy-les-Moulineaux Cedex France

Equipes de recherche : - TECH/EASY/DIAG (France Telecom R&D) - Systèmes à objets coopératifs (IRIT - UT1)

Tel : +33 (01) 45 29 81 91 Fax : +33 (01) 45 29 69 26

Page Web : http://www.univ-tlse1.fr/ceriss/soc/perso/marquois/Emilie% 20MARQUOIS.html

_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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-- Jesper Tække - MA. Ph.D.-Student - IT University of Copenhagen - Dept. of Digital Aesthetics & Communication - Rued Langgaards Vej 7 - DK-2300 Copenhagen S - Phone +45 7218 5000 - Direct +45 7218 5037 - Fax +45 7218 5001 - http://home16.inet.tele.dk/jesper_t/ - e-mail: jespert@itu.dk

At 10:15 04.11.2005 +0100, you wrote:

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for examples of virtual communities that gave bearth to other virtual communities. I mean that the members of one virtual community (a mailing-list for instance) decided to have two virtual communities instead of one. The first one is about a subject and the second one is about another subject (linked to the first one, more specific, for instance).

Have you ever heard of cases like this?

Many thanks.

Regards,

Emilie Marquois-Ogez

Hi Emilie - My impression is that this is quite common; all of the 3 mailing lists that I have done in -depth research in relation to have given birth to new lists (and others that I have followed more on the surface): some of them to be able to discuss more in-depth in relation to a sub-topic on the larger list ( for instance on both a professional forum I studied and on a political list). On another list for radical politics, there were huge disagreements on the discussion norms in the group, and the conflicts contributed to give birth to two new lists because members left the list; one women-only list and one other. Two of the administrators of the lists I have studied started 'their' Norwegian lists after participation on international/north-American lists with the same topic, which is also another interesting pattern that seems to be common. (that is; more 'local' / national oriented lists have grown out of international/north-American lists from the mid-nineties in the western world, when net-access started to grow considerably in other countries) Is this others' impression too? Best regards Janne

----------------------------------------------

Emilie Marquois-Ogez

Doctorante en informatique

France Telecom R&D 38-40, rue du Général Leclerc 92794 Issy-les-Moulineaux Cedex France

Equipes de recherche : - TECH/EASY/DIAG (France Telecom R&D) - Systèmes à objets coopératifs (IRIT - UT1)

Tel : +33 (01) 45 29 81 91 Fax : +33 (01) 45 29 69 26

Page Web : http://www.univ-tlse1.fr/ceriss/soc/perso/marquois/Emilie% 20MARQUOIS.html

_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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