Why are ground rules essential to any type of online community?

We have as a year group being discussing this in detail over the entire first semester at Leeds Met. During the discussions we have given our own views into what rules we thought to be most important and why they should exist.

For example in my virtual airline we lay down a MIS (management info structure) which helps set up a communication chain between different levels. We also provide rules to fellow members for them to follow. If any member does not understand a rule or all of them, then they are instructed to ask their ‘carer’ (in this context, it would be their hub manager).

In the flight simulator community that I am a part of (full time you could say) we also have rules which are to be followed by each member that joins. These can be found here:

http://forum.justflight.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15849

On the COOL forum we had a major discussion. We were asked:

Which rules do you think are most important for our community?
Are there any not covered that could usefully be added?
What, if any, sanctions might be taken if people don't adhere to the guidelines?

Here is how I responded:

Message no. 277
Author: Peter
Date: Friday,
October 6, 2006 23:28
I personally think that all rules listed so far are
equally high importance to the success of a community that is controlled by
these. I think as long as everyone understands them clearly, then I doubt that
there will be problems or worse, consultations between fellow
students.

If I was to choose one that I found to be the most
important one overall, I would choose ‘Be Active’. This is because without being
active on the forum then by logic the other rules are not relevant. At least
that is my personal view. Anyways I’ll have to cut short there as I need to get
other posts done before this deadline … I’m not the one to be ‘late’ in handing
in assignments or other work which has time limits. :( So I will appologise here
now for being late on these.

Net Neutrality - Part Two - The Future of Choice !

Hopefully in the future net neutrality will continue to exist and be thought for. If the content was to be decided by companies rather than the end users I think it would have great impacts. This would have the same effect as supermarkets did on the small high street shops. It would force small web sites which offer similar services to the bigger competitors, to have fewer visitors. In turn this could cause them to lose business and be forced to shut down.

An example could be with a web site such as Google, and say a less know search engine such as Snap. If all ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) forced their consumers to use Google, and also at the same time blocked the Snap search engine, then Snap would lose out on potential users of the service that it provided. If I found myself within this scenario, and I was shown a page describing that I was not able to view the Snap search engine I would be asking myself, “well why not? I should be able to choose which search engine I want to use”. As a consumer I would expect to be changing ISP’s only to find out that other ISP’s were also doing the same, I would be annoyed and would have to ‘do as I was told’ by visiting the other search engine Google. Not that I have anything against Google. In fact I use Google as my primary search engine currently, and choose to use the smaller search engines when doing specific content searches. So in the scenario if I wanted to do a particular search on a specific content and wanted to use this lower end search engine which provided a better service for my needs as a user, I wouldn’t get the results from the forced service as it would not be specific to what I would want. So hopefully in the future we as users will still have that choice and not be forced to do without.

Net Neutrality - Part One :)

In the past few weeks I have been reading around the module. Something which I have come across on several forums and mainly videos on YouTube is ‘Net Neutrality’. It is a vast subject and is mainly a major concern in the US. Even though it is more of a concern in the US, it does actually affect the entire world users of the internet.

First thing to do was find out what is net neutrality. I found two main sources to help me understand what it is. One source was at Google (http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html) and also a video from YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jHOn0EW8U).

I have understood it as who chooses what content you are allowed to view on the internet. I would personally prefer myself to be choosing which services I use; so I would be considered to be pro net neutrality.
What does this have to do with online communities? The subject itself has started off video messages on YouTube, of which have produced links to web sites which ask for the visitor to sign a partition to show their support. I personally have visited these web sites and signed the partitions.