About places

It seems you can hardly steer your browser down the information superhighway without coming to a "place." In particular , CHIplace and CSCWplace each represent an online forum where members of the community of attendees can gather before and after the conference. In concept, this allows the conference to have an impact that spans well beyond the less-than-a-week that attendees usually gather. In this column, I take a look at these sites. I do so with the following caveats. First, while I'm interested in virtual communities such as these, I have never done research on them, and my comments are written with complete ignorance of the research in the field. Second, I'm a skeptic. As a general rule, I don't get it. I think life is already too busy to spend time "visiting a conference off-season." I, like friends and colleagues, but have enough of a challenge finding time to keep up in person, by phone, and by e-mail. I have created profiles and even a message or two, but always because I was asked to by a friend or colleague-for the good of the broader community. And, until starting to write this column, I never went to the sites to seek information , people, or anything else. So, let's start with my recent visit to both CHIplace and CSCWplace. I'll start with CSCWplace, because there's less to discuss. After creating a profile there (since I'm on the committee, it was the least I could do-and indeed, I did the least I could do), I hadn't stopped back to see what was happening. As of this writing, which is about two months before the conference, this "community" has about 55 people with profiles, most of them very brief. Indeed, I couldn't find anyone for whom the profile was more interesting than their home web page, though in a few cases it was better targeted at the CSCW conference, which is nice if that's your interest. Beyond profiles, there were places for discussion, quick surveys, and CSCW trivia. Unfortunately, the community hadn't really started to create much content. There were two discussion messages, both by the same person, and both about improving the site. There was one bit of trivia. And there were a couple of survey questions. But it was clear that this was all "seed" content created by the site editors. There was a bit of useful information (links …