Echo - something to consider?

[Steve Hoffman]

This info is from the Echo site (www.echonyc.com) - "the virtual
salon of New York City."  Perhaps something along these lines might
be a useful model for some branch of SCNA?  (with or without the 
fees...)

===========================

Echo is unlike anything you'll find on the Internet. 

Founded six years ago in the heart of the West Village, Echo was the
first virtual community to take hold in New York City. Before there
was a World Wide Web, Echo was home to a small but vibrant collective
of people who shared common passions for reading, writing and
conversation. 

Today, Echo is a thriving electronic salon of over 3,000 members,
where people come together to share ideas and experiences. Post a
message and speak to dozens of friends and strangers, or just lurk
and listen. Echo is home to a wildly diverse crowd of New Yorkers,
who meet face-to-face at several events every month of the year. The
Echo community goes beyond the screen. 

Echo - lauded by the New York Times as "a cultural icon of the online
community" - is where journalists, writers, and actors mix easily
with teachers, lawyers, priests, and students. It's where raging
arguments over political and literary issues meld with intense
psychological discussions.

"Echo is a mixture of the corner bar, the debating society, and the
hottest club in town," says Echo Communications Group president Stacy
Horn, who founded Echo six years ago. 

"We've attracted writers from the country's top newspapers and
magazines, big-name and unsigned musicians, well-known new media
artists, the curious and the disenfranchised. It's really as big and
diverse as New York itself," Horn says. 

Echo is composed of over sixty conferences, such as Culture, Angst,
Music, and the House of Thought. Within each conference, dozens of
ongoing conversations are moderated by a host who welcomes newcomers
into the mix, sees that conversations flow, and keeps squabbles in
check. Echoids log in to talk about movies, Jacques Derrrida, old
cartoons, the Ramones, the East Village, Prague. Conversations are
articulate and free-wheeling. 

Over 40% of the 3,500 people on Echo are women - significantly more
than on other online systems. Activity on Echo is brisk, with
hundreds and hundreds of new responses posted each day. Reasonable
rates allow users to support a habit that can easily occupy an hour
or more each day, and a staff of seven maintains the system and
answers questions online and over the phone. For users eager to
explore cyberspace, Echo offers full Internet access at a discounted
rate to members of the conferencing system.

Once people have bared their souls online, they want more-they want
to meet face to face.Twice a month, Echoids meet at the Cafe Bar in
SoHo for drinks and conversation. They play weekly softball games in
Central Park. Or they frequent shows by their favorite all Echo band.
The connection reaches beyond the keyboard. 

"I'm not a purist," says Horn. "For me, the online connection isn't
complete until you meet someone offline. People who have
conversations online and have met face to face have a certain warmth
to them, a tolerance. People go even further in terms of intimacy." 

Horn holds a master's degree in telecommunications from New York
University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she now
teaches a course on virtual culture. 

For the larger new media community in New York City, Echo produces a
bimonthly discussion series called Virtual Culture, where leaders in
new media have recently debated topics such as the Internet
censorship question and the future of film and television in
cyberspace. And a monthly reading series called Read Only, where
writers on Echo read from their recently published work, regularly
draws capacity crowds in Manhattan's East Village. 

Echo has also participated in two experiments with interactive
television. One, sponsored by USA Networks' Sci-Fi Channel, ran live
online commentary during episodes of the cult classic The Prisoner.
And NYU's acclaimed Interactive Telecommunications Program produces a
weekly interactive program called Yorb, using Echo as its online
component. 

Electronic communities are proof that computers are no longer
synonymous with anti-social behavior. Once, a user sat in seclusion
with his computer-it was just him and the screen, alone Now we know
our modems can take us places where there are other people, where we
can swap stories ask for advice, connect. The machines that we once
thought would alienate us are helping to reacquaint us with each
other. Virtual communities take us beyond the World Wide Web, beyond
the latest "killer app," to a world where people furiously type in
their fears, their frustrations, their life stories and dreams.
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