April 1997 € Volume 24 € Number 2

Designing virtual electronic communities for OR/MS -- Part II

By Mohan Sodhi

In my previous column in the February 1997 issue, I proposed a design directed to 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. The proposal outlined the creation of a family of electronic newsletters on different OR topics or industry groups, each with its own web site. The newsletter would provide the (sub)community with takeaway value and stimulation, and its web site would host discussions and provide searchable archives. I then asked three questions: (1) What mailing lists, electronic newsletters or e-zines, news groups, bulletin boards, etc., do you use regularly and why? (2) What kind of virtual community features would help you with your work? (3) Are you interested in creating or helping with a virtual community? Here, are the responses in terms of four aspects of virtual electronic community design:

Specialized sub-communities
The responses emphasize that OR/MS professionals usually have specific interests although they do follow such general resources as sci.op-research and Brian Borchers' weekly digest posted to the list ORCS-L.

Others follow a variety of news groups; one respondent follows sci.math.symbolic to understand the intricacies of symbolic mathematics software (Maple V.4), sci.math.compsci for NP completeness material, and sci.math.statistics for stochastic models. Most respondents follow or provide specialized services, for instance:

Interior point methods -- Steve Wright and Joe Czyzyk run a web and e-mail-based service for interior point methods researchers. The URL for the web site is http://www.mcs.anl.gov/home/otc/InteriorPoint/
Applied probability -- Another respondent follows different web sites relating to applied probability: (1) The Probability Web, http://www.maths.uq.oz.au/~pkp/probweb/links.html, (2) INFORMS Section on Applied Probability, http://hong.commerce.ubc.ca/www/informs, and (3) Stochastic Networks Web at http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~richard/stoch_nets/. She also follows Marcel Neuts' (marcel@sie.arizona.edu) electronic newsletter on stochastic models that contains announcements, table of contents of Stochastic Models journal and information on conferences.
OR and healthcare -- Charles Platt (CPlatt1@aol.com) maintains a list of the e-mail addresses of IE and OR/MS professionals interested in healthcare management and maintains a web page at http://www.mccg.org/MCCGME/me.htm.

Critical Mass
A critical mass of members is needed for a virtual community to maintain its interest with the size depending on the focus of the community. For instance, the interior point methods' e-mail list server has about 420 subscribers, and the associated web site gets about 40 hits a day. On the other hand, the broad-based sci.op-research newsgroup had more than 17,000 subscribers last time I checked (1995) with about 200 messages a month.

Organization
Only one respondent said he would consider maintaining a newsletter or web site for a virtual community. Most people have little time beyond their own work, and thus it is necessary to have organizational staff to make a virtual community work. One example of a well-designed web-based journal is Computer-Mediated Communication at http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/current/toc.html. But the editor, John December, must put in a lot of work to solicit articles and on the layout of the journal itself. Likewise, for the interior point methods service, Wright and Czyzyk manually add researchers and announcements of new technical reports to the archive, and each report has its own web page.

Appropriate media
There is a range in the mix of e-mail and web use, with most virtual communities utilizing both. Neuts e-mails his stochastic models newsletter to subscribers.

On the other hand, December's electronic journal is solely web-based. And, Wright and Czyzyk take advantage of both the web and e-mail for the interior point methods service. There are also discussion sites on the web, and Harvey Greenberg writes that he contributes to Mike Trick's discussion site on the web (http://mat.gsia.cmu.edu/).

Conclusion
Those who replied had a wish list for those considering the establishment of virtual communities. This list includes regular information on conferences; lists of preprints; links to home pages and frequently asked questions (FAQ) lists.

There is much work to be done if OR practitioners are to be part of electronic communities. Some of this effort can come from academia and INFORMS subdivisions, as academics are not only ahead in the cyberspace game but also have computer resources needed to support services. But surely some effort must come from the practice community itself. More on who can bell the cat in the next issue, but in the meantime, I would really like to hear more from you.

Dr. ManMohan S. Sodhi is senior consultant at Sabre Decision Technologies (SDT). He is the founder of the OR news group, sci.op-research, and helped design and create INFORMS Online. Currently, he is on assignment in Boston, and can be reached at MohanSodhi@AOL.com.

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