February 1997 € Volume 24 € Number 1
Designing a virtual electronic community for OR/MS professionals
By Mohan Sodhi
"Life is elsewhere."This phrase, by the French poet Rimbaud and the title of a novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera, persists when I think about the Internet and online services. Of course, there is plenty of information to be gathered from the Internet, from news groups, mailing lists and Web sites as I explained in the last two articles ("Avenues for Information"). It would be nice to belong to a "community" of fellow OR/MS professionals that goes beyond what any individual Web site or mailing list has to offer.
In contrast to these "life is elsewhere" feelings, I felt I was in a community at the recent INFORMS conference in Atlanta. I attended talks like the excellent tutorial by Warren Powell and had private conversations to help me with the OR problems I am currently addressing. There were software vendors to whom I could ask questions. Besides the satisfaction of meeting people with similar interests, I felt I recovered the time and cost of attending the conference simply by gathering information about solving the OR problems for my client.
Possible features of a virtual electronic community
Can we create virtual electronic communities tying people together year-round using cyberspace to complement such conferences? INFORMS subdivisions, individual consultants or consulting companies, software vendors, academic leaders, practitioners dispersed within a large firm, and others interested in creating virtual electronic communities of members, fellow researchers or customers may draw a few lessons from my Atlanta experience:
- Subcommunities: A virtual
community can have many specialized subcommunities just as INFORMS
conferences have many specialized tracks to make it easy for
attendees to attend talks in their areas of interest.
- Critical
mass: It would be more conducive to potential participants to join a
virtual community if they know that others like themselves are
members.
- Organization: A lot of organization and hard work by
volunteers goes into making a conference successful. Similarly, a
virtual community will need organizational staff.
- Appropriate
media: Just as a conference may use talks, print and the Web, a
virtual community must use an appropriate mix of media for
communication. It is natural to consider cyberspace for virtual
communities as it is convenient and inexpensive to use e-mail, Web,
news groups, etc.
Do you belong to any virtual communities?
It may be that you already are part of what you consider to be a virtual community or have given some thought to this. Please e-mail me (MohanSodhi@AOL.com) about:
- What mailing lists, electronic newsletters or e-zines,
news groups, bulletin boards, etc., do you use regularly and why?
- What kind of virtual community features would help you with your
work?
- Are you interested in creating or helping with a virtual
community?
A proposal
One way to create a virtual community is to create a family of electronic newsletters on different OR topics/industry groups each with its own Web site. The newsletter would provide the (sub)community with takeaway value and stimulation, and its Web site would host discussions and provide searchable archives. Each newsletter could be e-mailed every month to its subscribers (or read from the Web) and could have such features as: abstracts of postings; reviews of recently published articles (relevant to this subcommunity, in the OR/MS literature); questions from subscribers, with pointers to answers available on this newsletter's Web site; and seed questions by the editor, with pointers to reader responses on this newsletter's Web site all specific to the newsletter's theme.
Note the following:
- Multiple newsletters could point to the same postings on the
Web. Editors of different newsletters could cooperate in
soliciting postings and bringing out joint issues.
- I expect many e-mail programs in the near future will allow
the reader to go to a Web address while in e-mail simply by
clicking the address.
- When a subscriber has a question, he or she could search the
Web site or e-mail the query to the editor, who would immediately
put it on the Web for "threaded" discussion. The editorial staff
could attempt to answer themselves, and/or post it to the news
group sci.op-research and save responses on the Web. They could
also e-mail a summary to the particular subscriber.
- A posting could be slides in bullet-point form, thus enabling
practitioners to post longer "articles."
- A searchable index on the Web for each newsletter separately,
and one across all newsletters would facilitate search for earlier
postings and queries. INFORMS and similar organizations could
provide central infrastructure to enable this.
- A large organization could subscribe to different newsletters
and then e-mail these using its Intranet to subscribers within
that organization. These subscribers could create a subcommunity
by building their own Web site around these newsletters and
putting pointers to the newsletters' Web sites.
Conclusion
A virtual community can bring value to its members in such ways as providing edited information and news, and quick responses to queries. The above proposal is one way to create such a community with life being here and now.
Dr. ManMohan S. Sodhi is Senior Consultant at Sabre Decision Technologies(SDT). He is the founder of the OR news group, sci.op-research, and helped design and create INFORMS Online. He can be reached at Mohan Sodhi@SDT.com and at MohanSodhi@AOL.com .He welcomes feedback.
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