Frequently-Asked Questions about Venice (*) ------------------------------------------- (* - or at least those I think people will be asking) Q: What is Venice? A: The Venice Web Community System is a system for supporting online communities and special interest groups. A single Venice server will support multiple communities, and all users authenticating themselves with the Venice server will be able to join any community based on that server. Communities will support features like Web conferencing, chat, and instant messaging. Q: Aren't there already conferencing packages out there? A: Yes, and some of them are very good. However, Venice is being designed first and foremost to support the Electric Minds community, and the software will implement the appearances and behaviors they're used to (at least for the most part). Enough other people have already found this useful that I think it will have broad-based appeal. Q: Who are Electric Minds, anyway? What makes them so special? A: Electric Minds is a pioneering online community, originally founded by Howard Rheingold, longtime user of The WELL and author of _The Virtual Community_, in November 1996. Electric Minds, among other things, hosted the discussion site for the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue chess match, and went on to become one of _Time_ magazine's top 10 Web sites of 1996. His company lost its financing, though, and was acquired by Durand Communications, Inc., of Santa Barbara, CA, in July 1997, who shifted the community from the existing WellEngaged conferencing platform to its own "CommunityWare" online community software. Electric Minds has been a lively place for conversation ever since, despite the departure of Rheingold. The current host of the Electric Minds community is Harry "maddog" Pike, of New Hampshire. Q: So where's Durand Communications now? Never heard of 'em. A: Durand Communications was acquired by Online System Services (now Webb Interactive Services, Inc.), of Denver, CO. CommunityWare was folded together with OSS' i2u product, and the result was introduced as WebbMe, which was also an online community system. Q: So why does Electric Minds need Venice? A: Webb Interactive is pulling the plug on WebbMe at the end of January, 2001. Electric Minds will be no more, unless it can be moved from its existing servers. Q: Can't you just use the existing WebbMe software? A: Not practical. WebbMe is written using Microsoft Active Server Pages under IIS 4.0 on Windows NT 4.0, using a SQL Server back end. Even if a server could be found to support it, the software is old and very touchy to administer. (Webb Interactive's work is all in Java now, using WebLogic and Oracle. Very few people are left who remember much of anything about how WebbMe works.) Q: Doesn't Webb have software you can use now? A: Well, they do have a Discussions product as part of their AccelX suite, but it has a couple of major issues: (1) It's not open source. In my opinion, it is not desirable for a community like Electric Minds to be held prey to proprietary software storing its intellectual content. (2) It's also heavy in its requirements. It uses Enterprise JavaBeans and requires the BEA WebLogic server and an Oracle database as back end. For our purposes, that'd be overkill. Q: Well, then, what about {Slash|Scoop|Squishdot|mod_virgule|etc.}? A: Those packages are all good (and, in fact, Venice may incorporate some of their features in future), but they were designed for other purposes. It's partially the nature of the software that makes Electric Minds the community it is, and so, to preserve the community as we know it, we need to keep the functionality as close as possible. (This will also make it possible, at a future date, to import the old discussions from the WebbMe Electric Minds into Venice, for future reference and for posterity.) Q: Why call it "Venice"? A: During its early development (predating the Electric Minds acquisition), CommunityWare was known as "Rome." Rome was one of the primary centers of advanced community in ancient times. Similarly, Venice was one of the centers of advanced community during the Renaissance...and, right now, Electric Minds could use a renaissance :-). Q: But you're not ripping off CommunityWare/Webb, are you? A: Not at all. Some of the design structures are similar to CommunityWare, but there are many significant changes. For instance, the Venice HTML interface uses no tags, and the security model has been replaced with a more self-consistent one. As time goes on, Venice will continue to incorporate features that distinguish it from the original WebbMe. Q: What was up with the whole "SIGs" nomenclature? A: That was one of the ways I was trying to differentiate myself from CommunityWare and WebbMe. However, the terminology ("Special Interest Group") turned out to be too cumbersome. Besides, as of November 2001, Webb Interactive is out of that business, and indeed out of all business but Jabber.com Inc. Therefore, I reversed myself on November 7, 2001 ("The Day of The Great Renaming") and they're now called "Communities" everywhere. (With two exceptions; the database and the URL generation, both for backward compatibility.) Q: Did WebbMe have instant messaging, too? A: Yes, it did. The original CommunityWare instant messaging and chat was based on code derived from Durand's earlier MindWire product. It was later replaced with a not-entirely-reliable system implemented using IRC. When Venice implements IM and chat, it will likely be based on Jabber. Q: What's Jabber? A: Jabber is the world's only open-source XML-based instant messaging system. Aside from offering its own instant messaging, it allows compatibility with other IM systems like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo!. See http://www.jabber.org. Q: How will Venice use Jabber? A: Venice will most likely run in conjunction with a Jabber server that can authenticate users against the Venice database. Venice will include Java applets for Jabber communication. Q: Venice should implement {cool feature} like {other software} does. A: Sounds interesting. Email me and tell me more. Q: My question wasn't covered here! Will you add it? A: Maybe, if enough people ask it :-). Email me your suggestions.