No End in Sight for San Francisco Web Developer Group by Janelle Brown 5:02am  20.Jan.98.PST SAN FRANCISCO - In a shabby YMCA hostel, complete with mismatched sofas and a cast-iron stove, 60 webheads gathered this weekend to hike in the rain, play Internet charades, and talk about the meaning of community. A celebration of the two-year anniversary of the local Web developer mailing list and social group NoEnd, the slumber party came at a critical point in the group's existence. For the second time in its history, the group faces problems arising from a popularity that threatens to drown its intimate feeling, as well as the low-noise to high-combined-knowledge base, that list members prize. The question members face is how to preserve focus and group dynamics in both the physical and virtual worlds, without having to turn away newcomers. What started as a handful of Web developers and designers getting together at a bar to share their woes about working online has, two years on, become a group of mailing lists with more than 300 members, a series of meetings with speakers ranging from Thomas Dolby to the designers of Salon, plus parties, bonfires, and copious amounts of microbrewed beer. Unlike most online groups, NoEnd was built around face-to-face meetings, from the group's belief that working online could be a lonely and alienating job, and that meeting in physical space was the best way to "humanize technology." At the twice-monthly AA-style meetings, each person tells the group about their week and how they are feeling - a warm and fuzzy, San Francisco-style routine intended to get everyone to participate and connect on a personal level, rather than simply looking for tech tips or good business contacts. Not that business interests aren't served by belonging to the group. Beyond just building a support group, the network is designed to put people with questions together with people with answers on everything from ad rates to Perl scripting, and numerous projects have been spawned by people that met via the list. As one woman attested this weekend, she can now charge twice as much for her production services as she could a year ago, since she can tap the collective knowledge set of several hundred Web-whizzes. While the meetings are considered the glue that holds the group together, the mailing list has often been the force that draws new faces in the first place. A mishmash of technical advice, industry gossip, and plain old chitchat, topics range from deconstructing Lucky Strike advertisements to JavaScript fixes and Netscape's strategies. Though nearly all vital lists at some time or another face the same issues when noise-to-signal ratio increases with the number of subscribers, the responses to ever-larger group sizes have been diverse. The 2,500-person-strong WWWAC Web-developer mailing list out of New York resolved the issue by breaking down into special interest groups, matching writers with writers and database specialists with database specialists both in the mailing list and meetings. craigs-list, a jobs-apartments-events mailing list with 1,000 subscribers in the San Francisco Bay Area, has simply broken the list down into "subjects": subscribers can pick the types of posts that they want to get, and all messages are filtered through one moderator, eliminating most chitchat. "NoEnd is smaller - and it has to stay that way because of the nature of conversation," says Craig Newmark, moderator of craigs-list, who also stays on NoEnd because he enjoys the social aspects of it. To preserve community on his list, "the idea behind the problem of size was to keep splitting the list into subcategories; earlier, it was important to do a digest form.... But people could still get their names out there and reveal something about themselves in a way that means a lot." But with the mandate of "humanize" rather than "swap information," NoEnd is trying to preserve the organic but unified group while still reducing the noise - an issue that became the focus of the discussions this weekend. "The growth mirrored classic group growth. Excitement, rapid growth, crash, readjust with a core, slow growth," says Caleb J. Clark, the group's original founder. "Love and caring for others, not self advancement and networking has kept it going. We've found that networking happens better this way anyway." Last year, the group faced a similar dilemma when the group's size neared a thousand members; then, the solution was to quietly move the list to a new server, so that only the diligent and truly committed would stay on. This year, they're looking for a less discriminatory approach. One solution proffered was to post initial questions or topics to the mailing list, and then move the thread to a Well Engaged bulletin board. Other ideas included implementing 24-hour "blackouts" once a week, adding topical micro-lists for technical questions, or simply appealing to members' ability to self-censor those "couldn't agree more" kind of posts. Meanwhile, a satellite NoEnd group is forming in New York, founded by former San Franciscans and bicoastal commuters who miss the NoEnd meetings or are looking for a more personalized alternative to the WWWAC group. Other NoEnders are talking of pooling resources and time to help build Web sites for needy organizations - perhaps even becoming a nonprofit group (as WWWAC and craigs-list have). "If you attract people interested in only taking from a group - taking names, taking information - then unless you also take their money, it's hard to survive. If you attract people ready to trade in like value the information and caring they receive, even giving a little more at times, then you can survive and grow," points out Clark. "NoEnd's hardest challenge is resisting the temptation to grow just to grow." Related Wired Links: A List? No, an Institution 7.Nov.97 Silicon Alley Revels with NY Film World Tourney 5.May.97 HTML Showdown Pits Valley against Alley 13.Feb.97 Copyright © 1993-97 Wired Ventures Inc. and affiliated companies. All rights reserved.