Undoubtedly, the Internet of the future will not be only a medium for nice or useful information. Neither a way of doing commercial activities in a new manner. Already, the net is used to computer-mediated person to person communications. The usefullness and utility of the mail, of the chat, and of all sort of forums get an higher and higher recognition. But we are at the beginning of these new ways of communication. Still oriented towards one-to-one links for the mail, let aside the mailing list, or mainly oriented evanescent and not goal-oriented relationship for the chat, these first techniques in the history of the web are going to be overcome by new generations it is important to think about.

At the same time, in our "modern" planet, there is an increasing need of social netmeeting. From the friendship to new political activities, a large amount of our non-working life is going on in collective activities. "It is not only a modern feature of social life: it is a sounded theoretical one, conceptualized in Simmel or Goffman works for instance. We, as social beings, are not assigned to one substantial identity; we are able (we have the competency) to belong to many world at the same time" (Dominique Boullier, working paper 12/99)

In the same time, a clear design stream for ICT products continue to be performed in an atomistic way. The mass market oriented studies aim to identify individual consumers and are seldom oriented towards understanding of collective usability.
On the other side, the social oriented leaders have not a very insight approach of how new technologies could be relevant to foster their field of interest (i.e. mainly in areas of public rather than private/commercial interests), today and in the future. That is to say we have front of us a large opportunity of research, at the crossroad of social sciences and computer ones, tightly adapted to the network COST269.

We are not starting from the scratch. For many years, a very useful direction of research has been taken, strongly influenced by the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Community (CSCW). However, as we write above, collective activity over Internet illustrates the need not to limit the scope of this research to " work " environments only, but to enlarge it to include the multiplicity of observable computer-mediated activities. A need exists to build a coherent conceptual, methodological and technical framework for examining what we are starting to call in France, for instance at LIMSI, "distributed collective practices"?
Distributed collective practices cover a wide range of organizational situations and it seems increasingly important to identify, describe and explain the social, cognitive and technical traits which are common to them.

We can make a very useful distinction between three main topics:

• Associative/cooperative activities: Social networks, Civil Society (e.g. consumers, ill persons networks, cultural interest-centered groups...)
• Politic society: (e.g. political parties, trade unions, political movements, organizations, government and its institutions, citizens...): E-Democracy
• Public institutions (e.g. of municipalities, regions, state, social services, etc.)

E-Administration

In these different worlds, we can easily find similarities and oppositions, very interesting to work on: length of life-cycle; informal vs legalized status; trend towards virtuality vs the basic need for face to face encounters; the predefined size of the group or the changing size; the formal allocation of roles or the informal mode of regulation; the sharing of a common background previous to the membership or not; the goal oriented groups vs the only convivial ones etc....
Generic solutions would have to be designed; but also adapted ones, for the main aspects of the so active living world of membership world. :

Building a general frame of the research field on Membership/Community.
There are three original aspects in this field :

• 1. Many recent experiments are currently on-going. We don't have the resources to anlyse all of them. We have to concentrate on the "research work" done about .
  2. mainly for the political and administrative issues, there is a lot of "celebrative" literature, which is necessary to drastically draw aside
  3. the ICTs themselves are giving new tools to study the collective activities; all the acts of each person can be put in a memory on a collective server. This memory has to be structured. It's a marvelous line for new research in social science.
• Mapping of the on-going research on these items all over the Europe on this field. How to handle with?
• Technology assessment of the existing products and technical systems. What sort of "dialogue" could be set up for bridge-building between the enormous needs of membership in society and the technical design world.

We have to start on the three levels at the same time.

Claude HENRY, 29th of March 2000 (from the minutes and remarks of a special group in Brussels, with Leopoldina Fortunati and Samuel Mauch)

Brussel Meeting March 2000