John Hopkins via Nettime-tmp on Sat, 15 Jul 2023 19:28:45 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Summary of today's meeting


Hi Joe -

I joined Howard Rheingold's "Brainstorms" community about 25 years ago after I first met Howard when he was in Helsinki on a lecture tour and I was teaching (netculture) at the Media Lab at what is now Aalto University. Brainstorms grew out of the WELL scene (for those who don't know, WELL stood for Whole Earth 'Lectric Link ... it was part of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth 'movement'). Howard was then a journalist writing about Silicon Valley.

Brainstorms, which merged with MetaNetwork to become BSMN a few years back, was
much larger than it is now, but there are still a few hundred folks on there on
a more-or-less daily basis. It's been running on a Caucus instance for the 28
years or so that it's been in existence. Essentially no moderation, but it is
remarkably civilized and community-oriented (with users distributed across maybe
30-40 countries or so).

There are regular f2f conclaves when folks are in geographic proximity.

...
Cheers,

John

On 7/15/23 4:09 AM, Joseph Rabie via Nettime-tmp wrote:
In the late nineties, I was a member of the Well. This could be accessed by a
text client, or a web interface, which is what I used. As an example of an
online forum, it was a flourishing, exuberant space, with many active
conversations going on simultaneously in many subjects. The forum format
worked very well, it was civilised and convivial, and I miss it. Members in
the San Francisco area got together on occasion.

Are there other people on Nettime who used the Well, or similar spaces?

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