ACT E-COMMUNITY MODEL
1. Executive summary. Project goals and guidelines
E-communities are not a new idea. People with long traditions of computer networking remember the so-called BBS (Bulletin Board System) communities of the eighties and early nineties.
However, it was not until the online boom of the late nineties that e-communities in the modern sense began to exist. Who has never been to, or never heard about, a website where users log on with a user name and password, in order to access material interesting to themselves and to other like-minded users? Book shoppers go to Amazon.com and receive updates on what their favorite writers are doing, when their next books are coming out, they can view some samples of their latest writing and communicate with other fans through message boards, mailing lists, chat rooms and so on. Fans of electronic music can do exactly the same on the website Clubplanet.com. These are only two examples that we thought of first ? practically anyone could give dozens of such examples.
If an e-community is to succeed as a business venture, it would have a huge advantage if there already was a group of people who shared a common interest, who need to be attracted to the website. In other words, first the people and then the website. It would be a big disadvantage for such a website if it had to first attract a group of users onto its content.
Fortunately, the ACT e-community already has a real-life community in place, outside the internet. They are of course all the students, teachers, staff and alumni of the different sections of ACT. The necessity of an online portal for them seems so obvious that it is hard to think of a reason why it doesn't exist yet.
The wonderful thing about an e-community is the huge v ...