I feel the need to ask the sociological questions? For example. What does it mean for social relationships that our dominant forms of communication technology ‘require’ us to deliberately articulate (reify) our social networks? To what extent is the process of articulating social relationships driven by the commercialization of the technology? How does the F2F variable intervene? Is F2F essential for a tribe?

on the other hand, how about if we reify the ‘imagined’ in ‘imagined communities’? leave it to individual members to specify their own sets of networks, and let information (gossip, party invitations, what have you) flow through it depending upon the members’ imaginations?

of course, mailing lists and tribe.nets also assume that a personal network is a relatively stable thing, and so make it hard to form incidental, short term communes..

Thanks for telling about your tribe. Just as a point of comparison (and word of caution in response to a few of the overly-generalizing comments), my “tribe” (whose tenth anniversary party is next month!) has never had leadership struggles, though there are certainly a few people that a few other people actively dislike. The mailing list for my tribe is completely open, but control is exerted on the social level (rather than the legal or technological levels, to divide the field like Lessig does). Interestingly, while the core membership — aside from a few stable people — has cycled through several times as people finish grad school or otherwise move on or away, the tribe still has a characteristic feel, and the type of people attracted to it stay relatively constant, even down to the few quirky medieval literature grad student regulars and the a capella singers. Oh, and “coupling,” and even children, haven’t screwed up my tribe at all. Those surface attributes of tribes can change easily; these groups are still fulfilling the same sorts of underlying human needs even when they seem to take different forms.

In some ways that’s like not having a list at all, but if you add some more features, the central management becomes useful: view & browse the membership graph, show people’s memberness rank (as determined by some graph flood-fill or PageRank sort of thing), and allow people to send a message not only to their own list, but to the N-step transitive closure list (to include friends of friends, etc).

Another clumsy moment with another social software is when to declare how you know your friends (family, school, work, travel. . .): same problem, combined with the fact that you are not willing to mingle your (bizare) workmates with you (dysfunctional) family.

I very much like you comment on what makes a community, don’t think you need to introduce an fixed frontier to it because there are none: it’s a holistic tool (and holism is morally bad ;^). I’d even say a technology with a “required articulation” is the wrong one if it feels clumsy to you. E-mail or IM do not require a declaration of friendship, so I beleive in a social software that reckon them.

In a word, I am not sure one should go beyond the Google “Contact” interface that is used for Mail, Talk and Calendar.

A little explanation – I am a masters student in a masters program at Ball State university in Muncie, Indiana. “Where?”, you might ask. Muncie is a small city in north-eastern Indiana. There are about 18 people in the program now and with partners and friends our group mails have about 25 people on them. We manage this just with the university email and hitting “reply all”. This of course leads to problems. People being left off or asking to be removed because of traffic on heavy discussions and then not being dropped. I think if I imposed any structure, they would balk at it. We have formed a large cohesive social group that we like. The most pressing issue is we have 18-20 new students coming in this fall and I just don’t think we can have up to 40 on a “reply to all” situation. I would love to have the time to watch what happens but danah’s post definitely has me thinking about it.