These are the questions that I am currently asking as a Helpdesk Volunteer (occassional: March to October when the times are auspicious) at Tapped In.

Why do I still (2001-2006) go? To meet with the real people there, who are really concerned with the vocation of teacher. Over that period I have a real sense of communication with a number of participants. I would have liked to have continued to explore a developing relationship with others, but some of my constraints, as well as their constraints have impeded - like it does in any real relationship.

What would I like to be involved in, and what would draw me more? (I have tossed around disengaging from time to time, when the interactions seem to plateau at a certain point.) The move to another level of engagement. I guess I will be able to describe it more when I have been there. At the moment I am still operating on my wish fulfilment energy. Engaging with Nathan here, as well as there, might be part of that kind of move.

To paraphrase Forest Gump, “Community is as community does.”

As I look back over the last decade and a half of online community involvement, the common threads are:

• convenient : “getting there” was easy
• engaging : there was something that “hooked me in” like a good book can capture you and spit you out at 3AM with the sudden realization that you have to get up for work in a couple of hours..
• active : there were other people there doing stuff. note that this is NOT that *I* was doing something there (the much vaunted characteristic of “interactive”), but that other people were contributing their social presence to the joint construction that resulted in a space (group hallucination?) we called “community.” Frequently I *did* do something there, but my activity in the space did not contribute to my own perception of community so much as it constituted my contribution to everybody else’s sense of community.
• transient : by this I mean that whatever it was that drew me in, eventually, I lost interest and moved on. Maybe I out grew it, or found something else that displaced it in my attention stream, or woke up one day and decided I really wanted to find (a) a different group of people to hang with for awhile or (b) some other knowledge base to explore or (c) both. Sometimes it was prompted by the evolution of the communiity and sometimes by something inside me. The longest I’ve ever participated in any of these communities is about three years. Most of them lasted less than a year — some as little as a few weeks.

One of the points that I keep trying to make about online communities is that the use of the term “virtual” in this case (as in virtual community) refers to the special meaning of “virtual” as “communication mediated by computers and/or electronic networks.” While the avatar may be non-corporeal, the person at the keyboard is very real. The aggregated activity of all those real people is what provides the environment within which community might develop.

I am tuning in to the parts you wrote that speak more to the experiences of the community activity over what it looks like.does. Maybe that is harder to focus on these days when the media surrounds us, and we have less time to plunk into YAC (Yet Another Community).

I am just starting to get involved in a project takng place in SL in my new job, and it is a rather amazing place that my new employer is creating there. I can see why just the casual wandered would be less than enthralles with the mundane and street level activity one finds there (we have a “private” island). I am cautious about the amount of technical/navigation overhead needed to become functional in SL.

It’s not the tools, not the tools, not the tools, right?