Tribal Villages

Welcome to Tribal Villages!

This web site started as an effort to create a more interactive online community than is otherwise available; it was intended to provide the substrate for a new kind of forum which imposes no structure of its own, but allows a community

• to build its own space,
• to define its own purpose,
• to make its own rules up, and
• to self-regulate.

To achieve this, the software allows any user freedom to not only create new postings in existing discussion areas, but equally to initiate new discussion areas; these can be created anywhere, including inside other areas. Furthermore, users can determine the rights of others to use their topic areas (read only, post, or create further areas). This allows you to create an area of a Village for yourself, populate it with subject matter of interest to you, and invite others to come in and have a look around!

The software has the potential to

• act as a forum,
• act as a message board,
• act as a personal blogging platform,
• act as a video-blog,
• run secure voting, to decide important issues!

The first incarnation of a Village has a written constitution, with provision for members of the community to hold elections to an upper council, and grants the members of that council the power to act as moderators in the Village (the software provides infrastructure for secure elections and for nominated members to be able to censor other peoples' postings; it even has a mechanism that forces two or more moderators to concur before an action takes place on a posting, so that no one moderator can run riot). This has been in operation for six months now, and appears stable.

This first instance of a Village is the Deaf Village. This was set up for the comunity of deaf and HOH (hard of hearing) people in the UK, and currently has 81 registered users. This is a very friendly bunch of people, and they will be happy for anybody with hearing concerns, whether they are actually deaf or not, to come and join them!

Available villages:

• Deaf