WELL: Encyclopedia - WELL

WELL

For the Scottish football team, see Motherwell F.C.

The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (or The WELL) is one of the oldest virtual communities still online. It currently has about 4000 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. The discussion and topics on the WELL range from the deeply serious to the generally silly, depending on the nature and interests of the participants.

WELL - History

The WELL was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985, and the name is partially a reference to some of Brand's earlier projects; see the Whole Earth Catalog. The WELL began as a dial-up BBS, and changed into its current form as the Internet and web technology evolved. From 1994 to 1999 the WELL was owned by Bruce Katz, founder of Rockport Shoes. It is currently owned by Salon.com, whose founders were regular participants there and who acquired it in April 1999.

Notable items in WELL history include being the forum through which John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor - the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation met.

In August, 2005, Salon.com announced that it was looking for a buyer for the WELL, in order to concentrate on other business lines.

WELL - Topics of Discussion

The WELL is divided into general subject areas known as conferences. These conferences reflect member interests, and include arts, health, business, regions, hobbies, spirituality, music, politics, games, and many more.

Within conferences, members open separate conversational threads called topics for specific items of interest. For example, the Media conference might have separate active topics devoted to the New York Times, media ethics, and the Luann comic strip; the Travel conference on Paris, memorable dining abroad, or travel writing; the Christianity conference on the Catholic Church, the writings of C.S. Lewis, or church architecture; and the San Francisco conference on restaurants, the city government, and neighborhood news.

"Public" conferences are open to all members, while "private" conferences are restricted to a list of users controlled by the conference hosts, called the ulist. Some "featured private" or "private independent" conferences (such as "Women on the WELL" and "Recovery") are listed in the WELL's directory, but are access restricted for privacy or membership-restriction reasons. New members may request admission to such conferences. There are also a large number of unlisted "secret private" conferences. The names of these conferences are public, but the contents, hosts, and members are restricted to members of a particular conference. Membership is generally by invitation. WELL members may open their own new public or private independent conferences.

WELL - Policy and Governance

The directors of The WELL have included Matthew McClure and Cliff Figallo, both veterans of the 1960s commune called The Farm, and Gail Ann Williams, previously known as one of the principals in the political satire group the Plutonium Players. Collaboration and irreverence are both respected values in the WELL community.

The community Conferences are supervised by conference hosts (approved by the WELL staff), who guide conversations and enforce conference rules on civility and/or appropriateness. Participants at the Complete membership level can create their own "independent" personal conferences -- publicly viewable by any WELL member or privately viewable by restricted membership -- on any subject they please with any rules they like. Hosts of indies are therefore not subject to staff approval.

Overall supervision is by several staff members, often referred to as the confteam collectively, as confteam is a UNIX user account used by them for conference maintenance. They operate at a level above conference hosts and resolve problems with users and policy disputes.

WELL members use a consistent login name when posting messages, and a pseudonym alongside it. The pseudonym (or pseud in WELL parlance) defaults to the user's real name, but can be changed at will and so often reflects a quotation from another user, or is an in-joke, or is blank. The user's real name can be easily looked-up using their login name. Often the login name itself is the user's first or last name, or their initials, although some login names bear no resemblance to the user's real name. This lack of anonymity gives a double meaning to the WELL principle, "You Own Your Own Words" ("YOYOW"): members have both the right to control distribution of their writings and responsibility for what they write. (Members can also erase their posts at any time, but a placeholder indicates the former location and author of an erased post, as well as who erased it.)

WELL - Joining and Reading the WELL

WELL membership is available to anyone, but requires a paid subscription. Most postings on the WELL can be read only by members; however, there are a few publically readable conferences:

• inkwell.vue, an interview conference featuring online conversations with authors such as Neil Gaiman, Bruce Sterling, and Farai Chideya.
• pre.vue, a varied sampler of WELL postings.
• deadsongs.vue, a conference to discuss Grateful Dead Songs.

Reading can be done using either a web-based interface called Engaged, or by logging into the Well UNIX system itself through telnet or secure shell and using a text-based interface called Picospan.

WELL - Journalists on the Well

The WELL was frequently mentioned in the media in the 1980s and 1990s, probably disproportionately to the number of users it had relative to other online systems. This has diminished but not disappeared in recent years, with other online communities becoming commonplace. This early visibility was largely the result of the early policy of providing free - "comped" - accounts for journalists and other members of the media. As a result, for many journalists it was their first experience of online systems and, later, the Internet, even though other systems existed. Although accounts are now seldom provided for free to journalists, there are still a sizable number on the WELL; for example Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle, Wendy M. Grossman of The Inquirer, and Andy Klein of the Los Angeles CityBeat.

WELL - Publications about the WELL

• Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community

• John Seabrook, Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace

• Katie Hafner, The WELL: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community

See also

• Godwin's Law
• Tom Mandel
• William Calvin
• Peter Ludlow

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "WELL", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki