MyKnet.org

Philipp ... Michael's invitation to include this document in the next issue of the online Journal of Community Informatics is an interesting one. I hope you will consider having it published in that journal. Here are some initial comments and thoughts about the survey and its results for everyone's consideration.

The initial paper about MyKnet, “We Were On the Outside Looking In” - MyKnet.org: A First Nations Online Social Network in Northern Ontario produced by Brandi L. Bell, Philipp Budka, Adam Fiser (CRACIN, June 2007) is a great example of collaborative work involving a lot people. The paper provides a nice summary about the early days of MyKnet that dates back to 1998 when K-Net was operating our web-based Bulletin Board System (BBS). I still remember over the Christmas break when Dan Pellerin, K-Net's former Network Manager, showing me a script that allowed K-Net e-mail account holders to develop their own web page. So I gave I it a try and created my first web page using the webpage editor that came with the script. I recall that Dan was listed as the first web page owner and then I had mine. Dan added a feather to the BBS sign-in page inviting people to create their own web-page.

Initially I thought this service might attract a few interested people. But within a month or so there were over 300 people who were working on their own homepages. Then K-Net started getting calls from the north concerning the maintenance of this service and the team realized that we probably had a tiger by the tail with this service. The interesting thing about this period of development was the patience the people had because access was only available over a dial-up connection. In many cases communities were using a shared 4.8K MSAT router to connect to the internet in order to pick up their e-mail and edit their web page.

Today, there are are over 30,000 MyKnet.org web site owners listed on the database. The management of this service is still kept very simple because we have to use K-Net resources to maintain this service. The web-site are monitored by their peers and if any user of MyKnet feels there is any offensive material on a page and reports this to the K-Net administration, then the offending web-site is immediately suspended and the owner is notified that their page is suspended and that they need to remove the offensive material to get their page reinstated. New accounts are approved on a daily basis with about an average of 30 or 40 new requests daily (this number is slowly declining as most people who want a page, already have their own page).

The online survey and the resulting report highlights many of the strengths involved in this online community. A few years ago I would suspect that there would have been very little response to such a survey for any number of reasons. In the fall of 2007, there was the hope that at least 100 people would complete this survey. In fact over 1000 people actually completed the survey with over 1200 starting it. These numbers indicate a large number of people who are online and willing to share their stories with others.

Attracting the interest of a doctoral student from the University of Vienna who wants to learn about the people and this region demonstrates the value of these online tools for sharing and supporting each other. Now the University of Vienna is investing their financial resources to support this research, indicates the importance of this work.

By April 2005, MyKnet.org was receiving over 100 million hits a month by its users. During that month, there was an average of over 40,000 DAILY VISITS to MyKnet.org. In January of 2008, there was over 70 million hits on this site with an average of over 20,000 daily visits. These numbers seem to indicate that MyKnet.org is still very popular but now with other social networking becoming more popular people are migrating to these different environments. But at the same time, there are the stories of people returning to MyKnet.org because they got bored with facebook.

Brian

Philipp ... some of the e-mail messages from yesterday's discussion belong in this forum, so I am copying them over to here ...

On Thu, February 21, 2008 11:17 am, Brian Walmark wrote:
I agree with Philipp... I think its part of the migration process... In Fort Severn, I discussed this issue with the e-centre manager... she talked about how her role has changed over the years... during SMART, she told me that the e-centre was the hub of all IT activity in the community... there were workshops, meetings and many many people accessing email and surfing the web much of the time... as connectivity migrated throughout the community people began to do more and more work at home... People began to call with questions or if they had serious issues they would come by the e-centre and  work out the problem there with the staff... She told me she was still as busy as ever because many people would want her to stop by their homes and "fix" their computers or network connections... Another factor that contributes to the changing role of the e-centre inFort Severn is finding sustainable funding to ensure that the doors remain open at times when people want and need to use it... Funding is also contributing to people in Fort Severn thinking about different roles for the e-centre such as contributing to the development of a community library or resource centre...

Brian Walmark
>
> Philipp Budka wrote:
>
>> Thanks Adam! I think this is also an indicator for the growing number
>> of PCs hooked up to the internet at home.
>>
>> Philipp
>>
>> adam fiser schrieb:
>>> Thanks Philipp.. there are a lot of interesting stories here. I'm
>>> struck by question 3.2.6 on page 9. Only 4.1 percent of 1028
>>> respondents maintain their pages from public access points (e-centres,
>>> etc.).  Is this an indication that the e-centre model does not serve
>>> the personal computing needs of the respondents?  Thoughts??
>>>
>>> Adam
>>>
>>> On 21/02/2008, Philipp Budka <ph.budka@philbu.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Friends,
>>>>
>>>> I am attaching a somehow final version of the report on the MyKnet.org
>>>> Online Survey that took place from Aug-Nov 2007 and attracted more
>>>> than 1200 people.
>>>>
>>>> It would be great if you could provide me with feedback on this
>>>> report by using the discussion forum I set up in the meeting place:
>>>> http://meeting.knet.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=51
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for your support and help!
>>>>
>>>> All the best,
>>>>
>>>> Philipp
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Philipp Budka
>>>> +43 (0) 650 95 28 244
>>>> Dreyhausenstrasse 18/7
>>>> 1140 Wien, Austria
>>>> ph.budka@philbu.net http://www.philbu.net

Hi Philipp,

This is a very valuable study and like the others I would encourage you to start publishing about it soon. That way other researchers like me can reference it and hopefully integrate some of your findings in our own research.

I was really struck by the links between myknet.org and community building and connection. So much around myknet.org happens at home and involves families and friends. Most people know more than 100 other people in their community that have a myknet.org page! Considering that many communities have only a few hundred people, that is quite amazing. When I was in Keewaywin and Muskrat Dam in January I saw very few people walking around, aside from kids and parents going to school. (Of course it was cold out.) On the surface, as a visitor, it’s easy to think of communities as a collection of separate houses with not much communicating going on among them. Your report is making me realize how much communicating may actually be going on virtually among the houses within the communities, all the time. It’s actually quite exciting when I think of it that way. I wonder if there is more activity on myknet.org in the winter months when fewer people are outside.

Can you do cross-tabs and if so are you planning to do some with your data? It would be interesting to find out, for example, if the people who also have home pages on Facebook and other sites have been using myknet.org for a longer or shorter period, if they are younger or older, if they tend to be women or men, if they are more likely to use myknet.org to keep in touch with friends and family and so on. There are so many different cross-tabs you could do to find out all sorts of interesting information.

If I was asked to be a peer reviewer on your work, my main suggestion would be that you will need a section – at least two or three paragraphs – discussing potential problems with reliability and validity. As you may know, in quantitative research, if we are doing a survey of people within a larger population (such some but not all myknet.org users) we use the term “scientific surveys” for surveys in which the participants are selected through random sampling. For scientific surveys, the reliability and validity can be tested and generalizations about the larger population can be made. Other kind of surveys, such as your online survey, are considered to be “not scientific” and so the findings about the people who completed your survey may not be reliable and cannot be generalized to myknet users as a whole.

I think *you can make a very strong case* about why you chose the online survey method for myknet.org and why you think your results are reliable and generalizable. However you need to discuss this and make your arguments.

Here are some references that could be useful.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/survey/index.jsp?id=trust

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/wright.html

http://www.geog.le.ac.uk/ORM/questionnaires/quessampling.htm

Best wishes,

Susan