Full Circle Associates

A community's history is a gold mine and often great entertainment years later. The Well is particularly lucky as a lot of her history has been recorded in books and magazine articles. And on websites here and there. This one surfaced last week during some of the 20th anniversary festivities. Here's a snippet. For the curious, click on!

The Backroom Incident:

"Unless you're a WELL user of a certain vintage, you've probably never heard of the backroom conference, and you will likely have less than no interest in this little jeremiad. If so, count yourself fortunate.

If, for some reason, you decide to read this anyway, a bit of background. 'The vile figtex' was a semi-affectionate nickname for the two people who managed the WELL, Cliff Figallo (login name 'fig') and John Coate ('tex'). The WELL was originally owned 50/50 by NETI and Point Foundation (home of the Whole Earth Catalog). Unfortunately, while this enabled the WELL to truthfully claim to have been born of poor but honest parents, it also meant that neither owner was ever in a position to invest money in the WELL when it needed a capital infusion, although the users were known to pitch in back in those early days - even to the point of buying a replacement computer.

In the summer of 1991, NETI, which was in the process of going bankrupt in an ugly way, sold its half of the WELL to Bruce Katz, who had made his fortune at Rockport, the shoe company. At the same time, trouble was looming as the WELL, which at that time was growing, started to overshoot its technical infrastructure.

I wrote this some years after the described events, to a WELLbeing who had not been around at the time. WELL login names are given in parentheses."

What goes on behind the scenes in a community - online or offline - is of incredible significance to the community, yet it is often not made available -- that's why they call it the backroom. Do you have any backroom stories to share that help show how to use backroom and backchannel interaction productively in online communities? How to avoid the bad stuff?