The WELL
The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL or The Well, is a virtual community founded in 1985. It is one of the oldest continuously operating virtual communities. By 1993 it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12, and gross annual income of $2 million. A 1997 feature in Wired magazine called it "The world's most influential online community." In 2012, when it was last publicly offered for sale, it had 2,693 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. Discussion topics are organized into conferences that cover broad areas of interest. User anonymity is prohibited.
History
The WELL was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985. The name follows the naming of some of Brand's earlier projects, including the Whole Earth Catalog. Initially The WELL was owned 50% by The Point Foundation, publishers of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review, and 50% by NETI Technologies Inc. a Vancouver-based company of which Larry Brilliant was at that time chairman. Its original management team—Matthew McClure, soon joined by Cliff Figallo and John Coate—collaborated with its early users to foster a sense of virtual community. McClure, Coate and Figallo were all veterans of the 1970s commune called The Farm.The WELL was a California-run enterprise in 1998 and before. The initial pricing structure of $2 an hour for a dial-up connection meant early membership was concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area.
John Coate left the WELL to help create SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle's first Web site. In 1991 Figallo hired Gail Ann Williams as a community manager. Williams, one of the principals of the satirical group the Plutonium Players, had been working in nonprofit theater management and was already an active member of the WELL.
In 1992 Cliff Figallo also left his job at The WELL and long time WELL member Maurice Weitman was hired as general manager. Figallo's resignation letter to the Board cited changes in company approach: "I am too much identified with the permissive and accommodating attitude that has been part of The Well's growth to preside over a more restrictive régime."
From 1994 to 1999 The WELL was owned by Bruce R. Katz, founder of Rockport, a manufacturer of walking shoes. Katz upgraded the infrastructure and hired staff, but alarmed members with plans to franchise the WELL. "Let's just say there was a communications mismatch," Howard Rheingold wrote.
In April 1999 it was acquired by Salon, several of whose founders, such as Scott Rosenberg, had previously been regular participants there. Wired reported, "The surprise move... gives Salon a dose of new credibility by tying it directly into a members-only community of scores of artists, writers, thinkers, scientists, programmers, and visionaries."
In August 2005 Salon announced that it was looking for a buyer for The WELL, to concentrate on other business lines. In November 2006, a press release from The WELL said "As Salon has not found a suitable purchaser, it has determined that it is currently in the best interest of the company to retain this business and has therefore suspended all efforts to sell The WELL."
In June 2012 Salon once again announced that it was looking for a buyer for The WELL as its subscriber base "did not bear financial promise". Salon also announced that it had entered into discussions with various parties interested in buying the well.com domain name and that the remaining WELL staff had been laid off at the end of May. The community pledged money to take over The WELL itself and rehire important staff.
In September 2012, Salon sold The WELL to a new corporation, The WELL Group Inc., owned by eleven investors who were all long-time members. The sale price was reported to be $400,000. Members have no official role in the management, but "can... go back to what they do best: conversation. And complaining about the management." The CEO was Earl Crabb, a programmer and supporter of the Bay Area folk music community, who died on February 20, 2015. No announcement was made as to his successor.
Technology and Structure
The original hardware for the WELL was a VAX 11/750, which cost "a quarter of a million dollars and required a closet full of telephone lines and modems." The WELL's core conferencing software, PicoSpan, is written in the C programming language and runs on Unix. PicoSpan was written by Marcus D. Watts for Network Technologies International. A license for PicoSpan, in exchange for a half interest in the company, was part of NETI's initial investment in The WELL. In 1996, the WELL began also using and licensing the "Engaged" conferencing software, which was built on top of PicoSpan and provides a Web-based user interface which requires less technological expertise from users. The Wall Street Journal was among the websites reported to use Engaged for online community.The WELL's conferencing system is organized into forums reflecting member interests, and include arts, health, business, regions, hobbies, spirituality, music, politics, games, software and many more. These community forums, known as conferences, are supervised by conference hosts who guide conversations and may enforce conference rules on civility and/or appropriateness. Initially all hosts were selected by staff members. In 1995, Gail Ann Williams changed the policies to enable user-created forums. Participants can create their own independent personal conferences—either viewable by any WELL member or privately viewable by those members on a restricted membership list—on any subject they please with any rules they like. Public conferences are open to all members, while private conferences are restricted to a list of users controlled by the conference hosts. Some "featured private" or "private independent" conferences are listed in the WELL's directory and members may request admission to such conferences. Within the conferences, logged-in members can see the real name of the author of each post. The intent is to foster a more intimate community through "people taking responsibility for opinions, obsessions, insights, silliness, and an occasional faux pas."
Women form a large percentage of the WELL's user community, and play strong leadership roles. "lthough women made up only 10 percent of people going online, they constituted 40 percent of the population on the WELL."
Initially, in 1985, the WELL was a dial-up bulletin board system influenced by EIES. Access to the WELL was via computer modem and phone line, then, when the internet opened to commercial traffic in the 1990s, the WELL became one of the original dial-up gateway ISPs to provide access to it. Over time, web technology evolved and support for dial-up access was dropped. Today users access the WELL via SSH or the web.
In addition to its conferencing services, the WELL also provided access to the Unix operating system for people who didn't have access to an institutional or corporate computer network, and management encouraged members to make and share Unix tools. This was described by early community manager John Coate as an early expression of what would later be called "maker culture." Reflecting back on that era in 1993, Howard Rheingold said that these factors made it an attractive environment for "young computer wizards."
Policy and governance
Many early writings about the WELL stress members’ attempts to test utopian forms of self-government in the online community. Kevin Kelly recalled the original goal was for the WELL to be cheap, open-ended, self-governing and self-designing. Cliff Figallo said the "exercise of free speech and assembly in online interaction is among the most significant and important uses of electronic networking," and hoped that the WELL would be a grass-roots alternative to "electronic consumer shopping malls." But members were shaken in 1990 when one popular and active member "scribbled" all his posts, then died by suicide, despite other members’ attempts to reach out to him. A few years later, two members involved in a messy real-life relationship posted about it across several conferences, dividing the community and ultimately becoming a central narrative device for Katie Hafner's book about the WELL. "People who had to live with each other, because they were all veteran addicts of the same social space, found themselves disliking one another," Howard Rheingold wrote.In retrospect, Gail Ann Williams said the "cyber utopianism" of the founders may have always been overly optimistic. Although the ideal was egalitarian and democratic, the early pricing structure charged users based on their time spent connected to the service, which might have allowed wealthier users to dominate the conversations in what Williams called a "postocracy." Thomas Valovic, then a research manager with International Data Corporation and adjunct faculty at Northeastern University, theorized that a "single articulate and entertaining person" might be able to steer a discussion through "sheer number of postings," and that this tactic could be used effectively to spread propaganda: "The same, of course, is true of other online systems." Valovic also noted that this early pricing structure gave an edge to people whose work subsidized their time on the WELL. For journalists whose work encouraged them to be online, the distinction between public and private discourse became blurred in WELL conversations, and it was not always easy to tell when people were speaking in their official roles: "the online environment has a way of homogenizing work and play to the point that separating the two becomes increasingly difficult." The WELL's utopianism was also challenged by its sale to Bruce Katz, whose vision for the company was more corporate. In her 1994 essay, “Pandora's Vox,” WELL member Carmen Hermosillo observed that by posting her thoughts and feelings where an online platform could profit from them, "I had commodified myself."
On the other hand, during a panel at the 1994 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Figallo reported that "encouraging the formation of core groups of users who shared their desire for minimal social disruption" had been generally successful in promoting free discussion without the need for heavy-handed intervention by management. Looking back in a 2007 interview with Rolling Stone, Stewart Brand said, "Communes failed, drugs went nowhere, free love led pretty directly to AIDS.... But the counterculture approach to computers – which was of great ingenuity and great enthusiasm, and great disinterest in either corporate or government approaches to their problems – absolutely flourished, and to a large extent created the Internet and the online revolution."
Stewart Brand's original member agreement was, "You Own Your Own Words" or “YOYOW”). Gail Ann Williams recalled the phrase had a number of different interpretations: In an era when it was uncertain how laws applied to online content, Brand intended it to place legal responsibility for posts on the people who wrote them, she said. But “a lot of people saw it as being about property, that it was about copyright, and other people saw it as meaning you have to own up to your words, if you say something heinous, it won't go away, you're going to have to live it down." Currently, the agreement notes members have both the rights to their posted words and the responsibility for those words. Members can also delete their posts at any time, but a placeholder indicates the former location and author of a deleted or "scribbled" post, as well as who deleted it.