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A New York City Dive Bar in Online Community Form

Published: Sept. 10, 2018, 9:30 a.m.

What if the intro song to\xa0Cheers\xa0wasn\u2019t about a bar, but instead about an online community where everyone knows your name? That\u2019s what\xa0Stacy Horn\xa0created when she launched\xa0Echo, an online community that sought to connect New Yorkers.

But Echo wasn\u2019t Stacy\u2019s first go at creating a community. While studying at NYU\u2019s ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program), she was working in the telecommunications department at Mobil and had an idea to connect employees and improve processes by way of an internal community. The community failed but throughout this conversation, Stacy\u2019s learnings from this first experience come up over and over again: the importance of actively seeking out a diversity of voices and experiences to be represented in your community, having a clear intention and set of community guidelines, and creating a space for the best in people.

Today, Echo is nearly 30 years old. Its archives are on record with the\xa0New York Historical Society and the historians that look back on its conversations will be in for treat. In fact, it\u2019ll be like they stumbled into a neighborhood bar full of people that have been chatting with each other for years.

Stacy also shares:

Why she failed when it came to starting an internal community for Mobil\u2019s employees
The costs and infrastructure behind Echo, including an NYC street excavation
How she made Echo an inclusive space for women
Echo as an archive to pivotal moments in NYC\u2019s history, including 9/11

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Big Quotes

On building an internal community for Mobil employees in the 80s:\xa0\u201cThe reason my [internal community] failed was that a number of [employees] across the country had just decided they were going torpedo it and just not participate. They were going to make sure it didn\u2019t work. The reason they did that was not because they were bad, evil people trying to destroy my corporate dreams. What I saw as a way of finding problems and fixing them, they saw as exposing their mistakes.\u201d \u2013@stacyhorn

On starting a community based on your passions: \u201cPeople will sometimes ask me if they should start a community [related to their passion]. My answer is usually that if you start the community, you'll still talk about that passion but you'll have a whole new passion that'll suck up your time. That passion is community management. It takes you away from that hobby, that love, that passion, and puts you into that seat where you have to maintain the environment so that other people can have that same passion that you once had and hopefully still do.\u201d \u2013@patrickokeefe

On where she was hoping to see more progress:\xa0\u201cIt isn\u2019t the internet or any of our tools that have failed. It is still us. It still comes right back to us and the people that are spreading ugliness. It\u2019s them, not the internet. It\u2019s a shame that they have a platform that they didn\u2019t have before which allows them to grow. Again, the ugliness is in them.\u201d \u2013@stacyhorn

About Stacy Horn

Stacy Horn, who Mary Roach has hailed for \u201ccombining awe-fueled curiosity with topflight reporting skills,\u201d is the author of\xa0six nonfiction books. Her newest is\xa0Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th Century New York. Her previous books include\xa0Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others,\xa0Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, and\xa0The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City\u2019s Cold Case Squad, which received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publisher\u2019s Weekly.

Over the years Horn has produced pieces for the NPR show,\xa0All Things Considered, including the 1945 story of five missing children in West Virginia, the Vatican\u2019s search for a patron saint of the internet, and an overview of cold case investigation in the United States. Horn is also the founder of the New York City-based social network\xa0Echo. Echo was home to many online media firsts, including the first interactive tv show, which was co-produced with the then SciFi Channel.