Interview - Jim Cashel of Online Community Report

Communities have been around since the beginning of the Web. Many have come and gone, and some have survived several economic downturns and varying levels of interest and disinterest.

Because communities are about people we can be sure that many sites will decide to integrate communities into their overall offering, and that many Webmasters will seek the ways and wisdom of those with experience as they craft their fledgling communities.

Jim Cashel is the Chairman of OnlineCommunityReport and Forum One. Having been involved in online community and communication since the foundations of the Web, Jim offers extremely interesting insights into the Web community at large...

SitePoint: You're Chairman of your own Web strategy and development firm, and before that you helped found a grant-making organization. What inspired you to start a newsletter about communities in the first place?

It was clear to us that through history there has been great progress in point to point communications (telegraph, telephone, fax...) and in broadcast communications (books, radio, television). But corresponding progress hadn’t evolved in the realm of group communications.

The dominant form of group communications today is still the face-to-face business meeting -- not so different than 2000 years ago. Online communities, however, can change all this. We see this as a potent trend, and one we want to track.

SP: What's the history of OnlineCommunityReport? Where did it all begin? And how long did it take you to get the Report to the point it's at today?

We launched the newsletter in 1997 at that time when communities were beginning to flourish on the Web: portals were adding message boards, chat had boomed, and group communications technologies were appearing in many new formats.

We wanted to track the news and trends in online group collaboration -- and perhaps help define the identity of the sector to some extent. At this stage we publish twice monthly for an "opt in" subscriber base of about 15,000.

SP: Do you see any particular technologies or initiatives which will truly advance "in group" communications to the point where we’ll be able to revolutionize our habitual communication patterns of the last 2000 years?

I don't think there’s any one technology that will revolutionize communications, but I do think that perhaps 50 relevant technologies will improve to the point where new models are possible.

If you start with a capable platform such as Yahoo Groups, which provides a suite of useful services, and imagine that these will be enhanced in coming years through better bandwidth, video, voice recognition, always-on access, and smarter profiling, you can start to imagine very powerful possibilities.

SP: Why do you think community has become such an integral part of the online experience?

The Web helps solve a number of problems that real world communities face: geography, convenience, social issues, etc. For this reason communities are embedding themselves into every corner of the Web.

SP: So how would you define a "healthy community"? Have you seen any truly healthy communities on the Web?

I'd say a healthy community is simply one in which its members benefit from participation in the community (and "benefit" can refer to lots of things -- information, social connection, entertainment...). Using this definition I'd say there are hundreds of thousands of healthy communities across the Web.