Thank you for visiting "The Navigator – Live." Today's chat ended at 3 p.m. EST.

My guest today was Frank Burns, founder of the Washington-based Meta Network Community. Launched in 1983, the Meta Network is one of the oldest online communities in the country. We talked about the pros and cons of online fellowship and the triumphs, tragedies and provocative political discourse on the Meta Network.

"The Navigator – Live" appears each Thursday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern time. It's a live, moderated discussion offering washingtonpost.com users the chance to talk directly to intriguing and sometimes unusual guests who are shaping the digital world. "The Navigator" appears in The Washington Post print edition every Thursday. You can read past columns by following this link.

Linton Weeks: Hello, everybody. And welcome to Frank Burns, who has thought long and hard about building communities on the Internet. Let's get right to the questions.

Linton Weeks: What exactly is the Meta Network?

Frank Burns: First, we're a community anyone can join. You can live anywhere in the world, you can hold and promote all your current beliefs, you can log on any hour via the Web, and you (funny to say it this way,…) you can press rewind, play, or fast forward. Our community history is all online. All the conversations and stories and dreams that define our sense of community are all available in our community conferences.

Second, The Meta Network is a support system for a wide variety of other communities. We support learning communities, professional communities, corporate communities, government communities, etc.

Washington, D.C.: What is the difference between the Meta Network and other online communities, such as the Well?

Frank Burns: Well that's sort of like asking about the difference between Colorado Springs and Scottsdale, right? We should want to know the differences in the environment, and ask questions about the history of the community. What are the stories the elders tell newcomers? ...just for example.

Linton Weeks: What else does your company do?

Frank Burns: We help organizations, particularly large complex organizations like HP and IBM, design and build online communities that support their people and their strategic objectives. We do this by providing community territories and events on our own tmn.com servers -- and by helping organizations produce online events and communities on their own internal servers. Basically we are a community production company.

Linton Weeks: What is your story, Frank?

Frank Burns: I like wearing funny hats and flying sport kites with my wife Billye. I catch some flak about the hats, by the way. But you can dress me up and take me out. And Lisa Kimball, one of my partners, wears two pair of sunglasses on the top of her head even when she's in a dark room pitching to venture capitalists. We believe that a certain degree of informality is important for communities. One doesn't wear a three-piece suite to attend a family reunion. Well,… some do I suppose.

Short story about me is that I spent 20 years in the U.S. Army and left in late 1982 to find others who wanted to build online communities that would help close the gaps between human conditions and human potentials.

Linton Weeks: No apologies necessary. We approve of funny hats.

Linton Weeks: What sort of folks belong to the Meta Net?

Frank Burns: Two categories: (1) People who hear about us from other Meta Network members, and (2) people who are members of the many private communities we support.

We tend not to attract any particular "kind" of member, but they all do tend to have in common a sense of the place and its history. Does this make any sense? (And we have never done any mass marketing. I don't think one can mass market a community. It's not the nature of the thing, you know?

Linton Weeks: The Meta Network has been described as an online Cleveland Park cocktail party. How do you plead?

Frank Burns: Partially not guilty. A cocktail party is a cocktail party. A cocktail party is not a community. A community may be punctuated from time to time by any number of different kinds of events. But our fine regular Meta Network member Dirk Flinthart lives in an outback village in Australia with, as he says, ONLY two pubs. He's never heard of Cleveland Park.

The point is that The Meta Network, like any online community, may sometimes seem to visitors like it's just a party. Not so. It's a real community.

The first thing everyone needs to understand about online communities is that they ARE communities. Real communities. The fact that they "meet" on the Web doesn't change the fact that they must be understood using the same concepts and principles that apply to understanding any community. Sociologists and anthropologists and historians have been studying communities for a very long time. What are the events that mark the community's history? What are the stories told by the elders to newcomers? What are the values conveyed by these stories? What do community members imagine about their future?

Washington DC: I've thought about starting a for-profit online community. How could I start such a thing?

Frank Burns: First, this is a REAL good question. Just about every person I know has asked me this question at one time or another.

As everyone knows, the great advantage of the Web is that it enables real communities to exist beyond the traditional boundaries of time and geography. But this does not change the fact that the purpose of a community is much more important than the mode it uses for conversation. People who want to have conversations with each other will move to the places where conversation is easy, where they can listen and be heard without being rushed out the door.

Those of us in the business of promoting and supporting communities on the Web must understand a simple fact: Conversation is everything. Fancy Web pages do not produce communities any more than fancy office buildings produce successful businesses. In fact, fancy Web pages can turn people off. If there's no conversational feature, there's no conversation. If there's no conversation, there will be no community. And please don't imagine that your "mailto" link at the bottom of your site makes it "interactive." Clicking a link is hardly the same as telling a story to people who are listening -- and then listening to the stories they tell because they were reminded of them by your story.

This making sense? (I always wish I could see all you right now in this "real" time.)

Linton Weeks: What draws someone to an online community?

Frank Burns: Probably because a community feels like a place you want to go to and be in because it's the place where you have interesting conversations with other people you know and with whom you have something in common. It might be a learning community, a community of practice, a user community, a hobby group, a professional gathering of people in your field. The "place" of the community is NOT a room of filing cabinets where people have access to shared folders of files and memos. The whole metaphor of the conventional office is totally wrong when it comes to understanding the "placeness" of a community in cyberspace. In a conventional community, you do NOT meet inside a file cabinet! You gather at the café, the town square, the barber shop, the park, the library, the student union or classroom or cafeteria. Same is true in a Web community. It's THE community itself that attracts people.

Linton Weeks: We're about half-way through the hour. Frank's got a passel of your good questions and he's getting to them as fast as his fingers allow. I'm going to sip a little cherry coke. Keep 'em coming.

Silver Spring, MD: Frank, in all the years you've been around this biz, you've seen lots of things come and go. What are the one or two critical developments, in your mind, that are supporting and enabling personal interaction via electronic media such as this?

Frank Burns: Well, obviously as we all know the Web has just been the most amazing thing to watch. These past few years of the explosion of the Web have been amazing times for us all.

But I believe that in understanding what's profoundly important about the Web, one MUST look beyond the technology itself. The REALLY important impact is cultural.

Take business for example. Or the military. The old models for structures have already been discarded.

Businesses are fascinating to me.

We believe that one of our most important learnings over the recent years is that communities are becoming the business of business. Corporate leaders have begun to realize that internal communities are vital organizing structures. They are as important, in many cases MORE important, than the formal divisions, business units, and departments that appear on the printed organization chart. For just one example, all the managers and employees in a company who are involved in one way or another in the management of the company's knowledge ARE a community -- a knowledge management community. And as a community, they share a history of stories. And they need places for their conversations.

Linton Weeks: How has the Meta Network adapted to rapidly changing technology?

Frank Burns: We're doing a lot,... but related to what I was just saying, we think the larger challenge is to adapt technology to rapidly changing human systems. We need to get this question turned around. If we can, and I think that's an open matter of curiosity.

Washington, DC: Frank:

On NPR this morning, it was said that the internet has been claimed and the only growth industry is in on-line community and conferencing. MDG & Caucus Systems is in a rare place of power here. Any coments on how best to succeed in this, a modern age?

Frank Burns: None of us has an answer, though I believe parts of the equation are becoming clearer.

I imagine that for-profit organizations will turn out to be our pioneers in community development because they realize that their existing organizational stucture has already changed. The pyramids are gone. And communities have arrived.

Conversations are the stuff and glue of communities. They are core business processes that are increasingly important as global marketplaces expand and organizations become more geographically scattered. It's impossibly expensive for a global corporation to fly everyone around the world all the time in order to have all the conversations they need to have. Conversational events on the Web will become the norm.

Kalamazoo, MI: What do you think the future of Meta looks like, Frank? Anything in the realm of online education?

@!KAT
Katherine Blanke

Frank Burns: We're doing a LOT, as you well know Kat (Hi)

One of my current favorite examples of a Web learning community is named "21 Beat Street." This is a program that we host on The Meta Network for Western Michigan University. The "beat" in the name stands for "Business, Education, Arts and Technology." The "21" in the name is for the "twenty-first" century. It's a collaborative program involving the university, high schools, and local business, arts and technology groups in western Michigan. This is a fascinating program. Among other things, it enables high school students in the Kalamazoo area to get college credit for courses in creative writing taught by faculty from as far away as Australia. 21 Beat Street is a model that every university and every community should study.

Another of my personal favorite examples of online learning environments is our own College of Exploration. Imagine global students around the world who are excited about exploration as THE mechanism of their learning and development. They, from their online classrooms at home and at school, can go to the far reaches of their curiosity. During this time when rote memory of historical factoids seems to be the test of education, our youth yearn for experience. They want to travel, to see the old worlds and the new worlds. They want to hear stories, tell stories, feel connected to history and geography and the culture of their distant cousins. They want to be in a classroom with people they could never meet at the local mall. They want a new way for finding their role in a changing world. And they want a way to shape the new world. They are bored in our current classrooms. And their teachers are bored also. Today's students and teachers want to mark new trails and to be in learning environments where they can share their curiosities with other students and teachers.

Washington, D.C.: what are some of the best strategies for enticing people to engage in meaningful online discussions?

Frank Burns: Events. Deginitely events.

Events are what people in a traditional community talk about. The homecomings, the parades, the class and family reunions, the fireworks at the park on July 4th, the big snow storm two years ago, the big town meeting 5 years ago about trash collection, the free concert on the square last week, next week's block party, next year's celebration of the dedication of the new high school, these are the markers in the life of a community.

This past fall, we produced a public three-week conversational Web event named Collaborate98 for the national Organization Development Network. It was focused on how virtual teams can increase the quality of collaboration in organizations. We had keynote speakers, guest authors, an exhibit hall and meet-the-exhibitor sessions, concurrent workshops, a resource center and library, a bookstore, an open space for participant-generated discussions, and of course an informal café for casual conversations and stories. Nearly 500 people from more than 20 different countries participated. It was a huge success. Last month we produced a similar event for IBM. But that was an internal event so I can't say much about it other than the fact that it was for the people all around the world in IBM who are involved in IBM's intellectual capital and knowledge management programs.

Mark my word. (Ha,... that's my funny hat talking...) Events is where it's at !

South Orange, NJ: Frank, you have been of tremendous assistance to my association of Organization Development practitioners (3,700 strong) in bringing us into the world of Cyberspace. I know that my daily work life has dramatically changed in the past two years in terms of the amount of time I sit in front of my computer doing online work. What do you see in your crystal ball about how I will be spending a normal day in several years -- will I be doing computer work 95% of my time?

Frank Burns: Hi... (and smile)

See, that's not the right question. You're not doing computer work right now, you're doing community work. And yes, you will be doing community work 95% of your time in the future.

And, by the way, it won't feel like sitting in front of a computer screen. It'll feel like reaching your hands through an endlessly fascinating set of entrances into communities. I love it.

Reston VA: I live near DC and have never heard of the Meta Network, why not?

Frank Burns: Give us a jingle. We don't stop after an hour!

Hey ya'all... even in my fast typing mode, this has been fun. Tough questions. Which of course are always the fun ones.

Linton, are we about over here? Sigh.

Linton Weeks: You bet, Frank. We'll let you off the hook, though there were a bunch of questions that went unanswered. Maybe you'll come back for another round someday?

Linton Weeks: Thanks to everybody--Frank, the folks at Washingtonpost.com and all of the curious people who sent in great questions. Join us next week for another episode of Navigator--Live. Until then...

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