I’ve been thinking lately about how real the online world is. Saturday night I went to a party and talked at length with one of my real world friends, Dean. It was fun because we keep up with each others’ goings on primarily through Facebook and Twitter, and the occasional email, even though we live and work within the same few square miles of Vancouver. We both have busy lives, and if it weren’t for our online connection, we’d be catching up once a year at the AGM of the Health Libraries Association of BC.

This had me thinking of other such connections in my online world:

• During one of the FOC08 course meetings using Elluminator, I discovered another participant, Daryl, who lives on the other side of the world has a boxer – his a white, mine a fawn.
• I recently read a tweet by the aforementioned real life friend, Dean – “6 Reasons to reject the iPhone” – which turns out to be a blog post by FOC08’s facilitator, Leigh Blackall.
• A few years ago, I was invited to dinner with a Boxer Mailing List friend as she passed through Vancouver on her way to a job in Alaska. One of the other dinner guests turned out to be a real life friend I’d lost touch with and hadn’t seen in about 10 years. We knew Susan from very different circles, both of  which were online communities (boxer lovers; Xena fans). (Susan’s suicide rocked both online communities several years ago.)
• At one of my dog classes a few months ago, I met Dug with whom I’d worked on a research project – all our previous interactions had been online until we met through our dogs in real life.
• Marta, one of my Facebook friends, is someone I met originally online through boxer connections when my partner and I were looking for our first rescue girl, Sassy. We now get together in the real world when she’s in town visiting her mother.

The online world really is converging with my real world – something I’m very happy about – because I’m meeting all kinds of people that I wouldn’t otherwise.

Dug and Spin, Mary-Doug and Freckle - at class

Vancouver Boxer Meetup: subset of the virtual "community" of boxer lovers meeting face-to-face at Vanier Park in Kitsilano last September

I’ve heard it said among some of my friends that an “online” community isn’t really a community at all. This is usually said by friends who are resistant to using their computers for anything other than either for work or for personal research.

Our blog posts for the FOC08 course are to be reflective and personal rather than academic (which is my first instinct!) – a not completely comfortable undertaking on my part. As I think back over my years online and my involvement with various technologies – email, listserves, forums, and now social networking applications – and think about the friends and acquaintances I’ve made along the way, I realize, for me, that community does exist online. The “groups” aren’t much different from my “real” life groups, except that I don’t always know what my online friends and acquaintances look or sound like. We congregate as a group for many of the same reasons we do in “real” life: common interests, shared places of employment, geographic proximity, mutual support, information seeking, etc.

On the personal side, I’ve been involved with the Boxer Mailing List for the last 6  or 7 years. Over time, I’ve made friends with a number of people from this community and have been lucky enough to meet several in “real” life. Our community has been badly shaken by the suicide of one of our members and the early and unexpected deaths of several others. It has rallied to help a rescue worker pay expensive hospital bills after she was badly mauled by one of her rescue dogs (not a boxer, incidentally) – she didn’t have health insurance because she couldn’t afford it. We’ve rejoiced with members who have gotten married, given birth, graduated from school. We’ve cried together when we’ve lost a beloved companion. In short, we’ve interacted in much the same way as we would if we were living in the same neighbourhood, worked for the same company, volunteered in the same organizations, studied in the same schools.

On the professional side, I’m been a member of a number of associations and listserves to do with librarianship and the information world. In our online forums and listserves, we share both our professional and personal lives. Again, there is camaraderie and a willingness to help and be helped by others, just as there would be in the “real” world.

Some of these communities are more “friendly” than others; some are more active, while others have more lurkers than participators. Just as in “real” life, we participate online in diverse communities, interacting and sharing with others as we go about our daily business.

My sense of community is one in which we interact with and touch other people in an emotional or intellectual way – this regardless of the physical environment, geographically close or distant, online or face-to-face. I don’t see my online connections as being all that different from far-away folks with whom I keep in touch by mail or phone. Keeping in touch online provides a different and additional means of connecting and building community. Being online expands my community in a seemingly boundless way, offering me a way to “be” with people I might otherwise never meet. I’ll be reading other FOC08 participants’ blog posting about online community over the next few months, seeing where we agree and differ – again, another commonality between online communities and “real life” ones.

• I registered for a course (Facilitating Online Communities) over the weekend, and participants are to track our progress using a blog. Week one tasks are to set up a blog (check), modify our profiles with our blog address (about to do), and set up a feed reader (check – luckily done some time ago using Bloglines).
• As well, I’ve been planning to participate in SLA’s 23 Things since getting back from the conference in Seattle last month. Week 1 task was easy and is completed – read the introduction to the program! Week 2 task is to set up a blog (check).

My (continued) observation is that one needs a great deal of patience when learning new technologies. Yesterday, I was on the phone with support at my ISP off and on throughout the day. They’re a great bunch, very accessible by phone – and that’s a good thing because their written documentation is a bit sparse. All was proceeding rather nicely with installing WordPress in a subdirectory of my website, when I got a message saying that “it” wasn’t able to create a database. It seems that I need to have at least one database available on my site. This I found out after-hours last night. Today, I upgraded my hosting package to get the database function. The rest was relatively easy (with a phone call or two to a colleague who has been down this road) – thank you, you know who you are.
It’s off to the races, now, as I move forward with both learning experiences. I’ll be tracking what I’m doing and my thoughts on the process in this blog.