No. 33

May 18, 2001

 

Technology:

CommunityZero

The king is dead, long live the king! My favorite online community tool, eGroups (now under the name Yahoo! Groups) has been dethroned. The new leader of the pack is, IMHO, CommunityZero. It has almost all the features of Yahoo! Groups, nicer interface, and none of the pesky advertisements. (That, actually, worries me a little bit... How on earth are they going to support this service in the long run?)

In my spare time (i.e. nights when I can't sleep) I decided to create an online community for my high school friends, most of whom still live in Poland. (You see, high school friendships in Poland, and probably in all of Europe, are really strong. After high school one can have plenty of "colleagues", but "friends" are rare.) After looking at several options, including a Polish version of German eCircle (http://www.ecircle.de/) I settled on CommunityZero because, frankly, it left all its competitors in the dust. The language advantage of eCircle gave me pause, but only briefly, until I discovered that one of the customization options in CommunityZero was changing names of the navigation links, which I promptly replaced with Polish translations.

Indeed, customization is one of the strong points of this very robust, free tool. I was able to pick a color scheme from a fairly large selection, upload my own logo and title, create custom opening page (sporting a photo of our entire 9th grade class), remove site components I did not need. It was all very intuitive, accomplished with several clicks within the administrative pages. When I was done setting it up, my community was outfitted with a discussion board, photo album, file exchange area, calendar, notes (brief announcements), lists (simple databases), polling mechanism, and a chat room. The final step was to enter e-mail addresses of people I wanted to invite, write a brief explanation, and CommunityZero took care of notifying them via e-mail, providing a link in the message, and signing them up.

Of course, that's all pretty standard fare. What's really unique about CommunityZero is the complete lack of commercial ads: no banners, no message footers, no pop-up windows. This despite the fact that setting up a community like the one I described above doesn't cost anything. The only catch is the relatively minuscule amount of allocated server space: 5 MB. That's plenty for discussions, polls, announcements, etc., but a photo album can quickly eat this up, not to mention a few psychedelic tunes from the 70's in MP3... One can purchase more space, but for $10/month for each additional 5 MB it ain't cheap. (Well, this may actually be paying for the freedom from ads, so one shouldn't complain.)

Another nifty feature of CommunityZero is the "What's New" page that greets everybody who logs into the community. This page displays all the new items  that have been added in recent days (or weeks, depending on how engaged the members are): new discussion postings, new announcements, new photos, current active poll, new files, upcoming events, etc. One can click on any of the items to go to it directly, or visit the parent section of that item. Finally, a "Who's on" button at the bottom of the browser window shows the number of community members currently logged in. Clicking on this button reveals their names and allows sending an instant message to any one of them. Unfortunately, I only managed to crash my friend's browser several times when trying to use this button. It is a beta feature, so this misbehavior can be forgiven. Especially since, overall, CommunityZero is a really wonderful tool for small groups working or playing together.

CommunityZero (click on thumbnail):
Creating new community 
"What's New" page

For more information please visit CommunityZero site or search the ACT database.

Conference:

WET ICE 2001
  • 10th IEEE International Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises
  • Held June 20-22, 2000 in Cambridge, MA
  • WET ICE is an annual, international forum for state-of-the-art research in enabling technologies for collaboration. WET ICE 2001 will consist of parallel, three-day workshops on different topics related to collaboration technology. Each workshop will include paper presentations and working group discussions, with additional joint keynote sessions and a final joint session to summarize each groups' findings
  • Topic areas:
    1. Enterprise Security
    2. Knowledge Media Networking
    3. Web-based Infrastructures and Coordination Architectures for Collaborative Enterprises
    4. Integrating XML and Distributed Object Technologies
    5. Evaluating Collaborative Enterprises
    6. Infrastructure and Applications for the Mobile Internet

Initiative:

Project Harmony

From the home page: "Project Harmony's Program for Internet Community Development in the Caucasus (ICD), which is funded by the US State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affair, promotes the use of the Internet as a democracy-building and community-organizing tool for professionals in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The first year of the program aims to develop two distinct online communities - one serving the development of small businesses and one serving organizations that aid refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). The training, educational and outreach activities of the program aim to build the local capacity of professionals in these fields to use and create multi-language online resources such as: online newsletters, discussions lists, e-mail conferences, interactive websites, online events such as web chats and forum discussions. ICD program aims to assist in identifying concrete information needs within the two target communities and exploring strategies for making better use of the access and technology that currently exists."

Online reading:

"Changing Lenses:
Thinking About Two Weeks in the Caucasus" by Nancy White, Full Circle Associates
In this detailed but highly readable, engaging report studded with photos, Nancy White, a skilled online host and facilitator, founder and president of a communication consulting firm, describes a series of online and offline meetings and conferences that took place in early 2001. These events, organized under the auspices of Project Harmony's Program for Internet Community Development in the Caucasus (see description above), brought together representatives from non-governmental organizations and small-to-medium businesses from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as American trainers and, of course, Project Harmony's staff. The Lessons Learned section at the end of the report is particularly worth recommending. Recognizing the value of this section, at the top of her report Ms. White advises impatient readers to scroll down to it. However, I hope that not many people take this advice and miss an interesting story.


© 2001 Vlad Wielbut and the Alliance for Community Technology