Full Circle Associates

I subscribe to a persistent Bloglines search for "online community" which unearths interesting nuggets when I have time to scan (or when I'm in work avoidance mode.) Today I found the work of Jordan. (September 5, 2006 edited to remove non functioning hyperlinks.)

OWL.1 - Design Philosophy

What we need is an Organizational Whuffie Liaison; a structured way to trade hacker whuffie for cold hard cash. Taking inspiration from my alma mater, I was taught that intelligence and dedication should be enough to get by in life. Those who refuse to compromise craft their own life lessons through trails of momentary misdirection.

But what is Owl? It lies somewhere in the intersection of RentACoder and SourceForge. It’s a project marketplace where ideas are proposed, designed, developed, and funded. It tracks sucessfully created projects and builds upon some notion of whuffie. It promotes cross-pollination through code reuse. It is driven fundamentally by economic incentive.

OWL.2 - History of GroupWare

To gain perspective on Owl, I’ll be exploring the histories of tangential pieces of software in the next few posts. I’m going to start with Commercial GroupWare, as these are the pieces of software that have been most influential (from a userbase perspective) to the current state of online community.

OWL.3 - History of Online Commmunity

Today I’m going to be doing a rundown of the technology behind online community. This is a far more academically interesting topic than Commercial GroupWare, simply because we see technology being driven by what is possible rather than by what is economically viable.

I've just scanned the three articles so far, but I had to smile to note the third part, as today is the 20th Anniversary of The Well. Online community has been a central part of my life since 1996, so I'm a relative newbie, but I feel like a part of this larger network of those who have experienced true community online.