Eight years ago, GMD Studios was buried in online discussions about the Clinton impeachment. Working with our friends at Weblab, we were experimenting with how you could structure online dialogs in new ways designed to avoid the classic problems of "invisible man culture", a phrase coined by collaborator Barry Joseph (now of GlobalKids.org) as part of a MacArthur Foundation funded evaluation of the technique.

The Web still suffers from these same problems, maybe even more so; the deja vu of today's political climate and the shortcomings of blogging's contributions to that conversation is seems so similar to the issues we were grappling with in 1998. In the day, the idea of making civil discussions happen while the Clinton impeachment was still taking place seemed almost foolhardy -- grab the most dividing issue of the day and produce civil, meaningful opportunities for conversation and learning. When you boil that down to the core idea of "invisible man culture" you focus on the role of community versus privacy, and how you convince participants to risk a little bit more of themselves than they used to risking.

The "small group dialogues" process really broke down into three key practices: (1) participants self-select and commit to contribute, (2) the activities are in small enough groups that loud voices don't rule the day, (3) the process has starting and ending experiences that everyone goes through together. Volunteer. Intimate. Experiences. Metaphorically, these ideas are very different from, say, "users, massive and page views" or "customers, targeted and sales".

The difficult task was always in taking a bunch of these and figuring out how to help people discover the amazing stuff happening in all of these parallel discussions, but on the whole the tone and meaningfulness for the participants was radically different than "most Internet discussions".

Today, these questions are more familiar ground: in 1998, we were still trying to prove that media created by "real people" could be as compelling as the experiences created by "professionals". Now consumer generated media and social networking and swarmed content and the blogging revolution and alternate reality gaming and a host of other elements loosely associated with "Web 2.0" is becoming (from conference panel to conference panel) more and more obsessed with some of these same dilemmas of invisible man culture that we were pondering from a "public use" standpoint in 1998. We found no definitive answers, but we at least proved to ourselves that there was more flexibility in the models of community building than "what everyone is already doing."