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: (1) 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. (2) Critical mass: It would be more conducive to potential participants to join a virtual community if they know that others like themselves are members. (3) Organization: A lot of organization and hard work by volunteers goes into making a conference successful. Similarly, a virtual community will need organizational staff. (4) 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 ([email protected]