Some nine years ago I set out to connect some of my university buddies with each other and all of us by setting up an e-group for them. The concept was new and exciting then - it was easy get my University friends, located all over the world, to subscribe and enjoy the networking. It was amazing how some 72 of us could positively use the network which was abuzz with an average of some 300 mails a month. Ofcourse, for a university that had an annual intake of over 3000 people that was really a small number of us who were in touch with each other! But it was great because we shared so much through the e-group - then, one of our group, a revered and most admired member of the group passed away and left us all suddenly all too aware of our mortality! Thanx to the e-group we re-grouped and actually started a campaign to set up a scholarship in the old university in the name of our dear, departed friend. It did not take us too long to collect a corpus of funds from all over the world and put it in fixed deposit in the university so as to allow the interest to be used to pay out the scholarship. It paid for one student every year and covered his/her entire cost of studying (three years) at the university - at the time it was the highest paying scholarship in the university.
An aerial view of the 12,000 hectare university campus in the foothills of the Himalayas
Soon I began wondering why my boarding school buddies did not network in this manner - suggestions to start an e-group similar to what I had set up among my University friends did not elicit an excited response. But start it I did and in a month we had just some 50 people signed on. It was fun because there were so many shared experiences to talk about online. One thing led to another and we had dozens of folks registering for membership in the e-group - all people who passed through the portals of the nearly 90+ year old school, people who lived in far flung places on every continent! In a years time we had clocked up a membership of over 1000 ex-students which was amazing given that only 4000 students had ever studied in the old school! The e-group became the main communication tool for alumni of the school to arrange reunions worldwide and the annual reunion in the old school nestled in a beautiful valley in the hills of south India.
The beautiful valley of Ketti with the 260 acre boarding school campus spread on either side of the school steeple
On the school e-group we were soon averaging something like 2000 mails a month by the year 2008 and the community was humming along until somebody got intemperate with somebody online and there are sides being taken and we soon have a situation not very different from what would happen in a living, breathing neighbourhood! Thats when one realises that virtual communities have all the attributes of real communities and it becomes necessary to moderate (thus was born the concept of policing!) people's activities online! As the Moderator of the school e-group it was tough deciding whether a particular line of communication will split the e-group down the middle or if some dissent and open talk should be allowed to occur!
