At last year's Reboot conference, I gave a talk about a website called kozarac.ba, whose story is a source of great inspiration to me when thinking about the value that niche online social networks can play in the real world. It was a difficult talk to give, because it is connected to some very painful experiences for those involved, but I just about held it together. In preparation for a different talk about niche online social networks at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin last week, I made a slidecast combining the audio with my slides, so you can judge for yourselves:
By way of general background, Allan Little did a great report on the Bosnian elections and the ongoing ethnic division of the country for Radio 4 last week. Slovene photographer Borut Peterlin recently published a nice series of shots about Kozarac taken this summer as part of a reportage piece for Corriera della Serra and others, including a portrait of Svabo who runs the Kozarac.ba site and the local cybercafe.
Why does this case study matter? Because it shows what people can achieve with simple technology if they have a real need for connection and collaboration. Too often in third sector organisations we work with, people are reluctant to adopt new tools or new ways of working, because they are not perceived as meeting real needs, or (let's be honest) because they simply can't be bothered. But what blows me away about the work of Kozarac.ba and their community is how they have used very simple (free) tools to achieve amazing real world outcomes.
Overall, this is a study of how virtual community can sometimes help overcome immense structural damage to real-world networks in the physical realm. For a long time, the town of Kozarac barely existed in a physical sense - it had been destroyed and its population killed or expelled - but it continued to exist in the virtual realm until the first brave returnees began re-making their town about 9-10 years ago, and since then, the online community has acted as a bridge between local returnees and those living in exile all over the world.
But Kozarac.ba has also overcome another kind of structural hole in the networks that form the community. Central to the techniques of ethnic cleansing in this area was the idea of eliticide, as Peter Maas wrote in Vanity Fair some years ago. In other words, doctors, writers, politicians and indeed potential leaders of any kind were systematically killed as a way of destroying the fabric of their community. The absence of these people is still keenly felt, and without their leadership it has fallen to ordinary (but often quite remarkable) people to fill the gaps. They could not have done so, especially given that they now live all over the world, without the co-ordinating role of their online community.
In my little study, there are several examples of how the site creates a sense of ambient intimacy for those still living abroad, and how the forums are a place where real world outcomes are born from online discussion; but my favourite story is that of the fire service that was reborn from within the online community. Since I gave the talk, this self-funded fire service has gone from strength to strength, and the local Serb authorities have been forced to give them official recognition. They stick to their principle that "the only enemy is fire", and there is no such thing as a Serb fire or a Bosniak fire, and as a result they are winning fans even among surrounding Serbian towns who would otherwise have little do to with Kozarac. This is quite an achievement to say the least.
I think there are some real lessons here for those of us who are involved with online communities and social networks, and what I take out of this is that there remains huge untapped social value in connecting people with common purpose and bridging real world distance and structural network damage.
Credits: I had absolutely nothing to do with the success of Kozarac.ba, and have only studied it. Many thanks to Svabo and Ali for allowing me to analyse 18 months of messaging and forum data for this study, and all opinions and/or errors expressed here are my own.
The Headshift blog feed