Andy Baio, co-founder of Upcoming.org, at Hack Day 2006.
Andy gave an engaging talk about online communities and the unique ecosystems that they create. As the founder of a site that encourages real-life social interaction, he was interested in examining the history of meetups, the face to face meetings that have a strong tradition within geek communities. He thinks that we can learn more about how online communities work by studying how and why these communities come together in real life.
Andy started by talking about the original geek community: amateur radio operators. He gave us a brief history of the HAM radio community and drew an interesting parallel: HAMs are geeks with funny handles chatting with each other over long distances (sounds familiar). HAM radio operators also have their own shorthand, much like instant messenger users.
Some more notes from his talk:
For every online community, there has always been a subset of members that ends up meeting face to face. It's not for everyone within the commons, but people do eventually feel the need to seek each other out for "eyeball contact."
Andy identified three key reasons members of online communities seek out face to face contact with each other.
High bandwidth. Talking to somebody face to face, you can much better infer details like emotion, sarcasm and subtleties in tone.
Trust. When you meet somebody and talk to them, you feel more willing to trust them. Humans are trained to evaluate people based on body language and speech, and you only get that when you actually talk to somebody.
Emotional connection. Having dinner with somebody or engaging in a long talk introduces a level of emotional connection that is totally impossible to find in online communication.
Andy also demostrated that some communities aren't really conducive to meetups. Del.icio.us and Slashdot are examples.
