- Email: [email protected]
India network—the first case study of a virtual community
computer communiii ELSEVIER
Computer Communications 20
India Network-the
(I 998)
1527-
I533
first case study of a virtual community K.V. Rae*
Abstract In this paper. we describe the historical development of a virtual community of Asian Indians and how the Internet helped create such a network. The Indian Network is the oldest e-mail network serving the Asian Indian community around the world. Although it is physically located in the United States, it serves members in more than 75 countries, providing them with news, information and advice. A detailed discussion on problems and issues in establishing an Internet-based network is provided in the paper. In addition, the advantages of the Internet in building a virtual community of immigrant populations separated by thousands of miles physically, but just an e-mail away are outlined. This paper will be of use to those interested in developing community networks for other communities. It will also help experts in computer science and information technology develop software tools to meet the challenges in aiding development of virtual communities. Another important contribution of these specialized lists is our ability to reach the community for research purposes which otherwise would be impossible. The credit card usage study and membership survey results are discussed towards the end of the paper. 0 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. Kqwnrds:
Asian Indians; Internet communication;
Virtual community
1. Introduction A recent upsurge in the use of the Internet by people other than computer scientists created numerous opportunities to communities spread across the nation and around the world. The Internet provided a fast and efficient way to reach people having similar interests, but spread over continents. It also provided instant access to exchange of information and for networking among groups. As a culture, the Internet has provided an instant opportunity to communicate with everyone and anyone irrespective of their position and rank in an informal way. It is estimated that virtually all offices are Internet-connected in the United States either by their own networks with their own domain names or with the assistance from commercial service providers such as America Online, Compuserve, etc. The Internet connectivity to schools has been the top priority of the current administration in the United States. The Internet also helped to remove the barriers of access to information and help reduce the difference between big and small companies since they all share the same Internet web space in the same way. Internet can be seen as a global phenomenon creating a world with no boundaries and a powerful medium that made distances irrelevant in building communities. The * Tel.:
419.372
7240: fax: 419 372 8306; e-mail: [email protected]
0140-3664/98/$19.00
0
PII SO 140.3664(97)00
1998 Elsevier
159-X
Science B.V. AI1 rights reserved
India Network is such a virtual community of consisting of people of Asian Indian region living in more than 75 countries around the world. In this paper, we describe building a virtual community using Internet and provide an insight into the problems and issues in developing such a community. A recent survey of Nielsen Media Research [l] shows that one in four Americans have Internet access and it is estimated that more than 50 million people in the US and Canada surf the Internet on a regular basis. Once dominated by males, the Internet community is now attracting about 2 1 million women in Canada and United States. It is estimated that the access to Internet in the United States would reach the level of telephone access, which is about 94% in less than a decade [2,3]). The growth in Internet use can be attributed to the ease of access and low costs of access in the US. Although the Internet has not reached the levels of US usage in other parts of the world, it is expected to grow exponentially, reaching millions living in all parts of the world in the next few years. The Internet connectivity provides an excellent opportunity for people living far away from each other to feel at home with an exchange of e-mails and other information through the Internet. This is particularly so with the global community of Asian Indians. The expatriate Asian Indians as a group are highly educated, and were eagar to take advantage of new technologies to keep in touch with
K.V. Rae/Computer Communications 20 (1998) 1527-1533
1528
Table 1 Asian Indians in the United States, 1980 and 1990 Gender
1980
1990
Increase
Percentage increase
Male Female Total
217700 197080 414780
464 673 405 227 869 900
246 973 208 147 455 120
1 13.4 105.6 109.7
Source: US Census, 1980 and 1990. Refs. [5,7].
happenings at home. There are several others who have developed an interest either through developmental work done or through participation in religious work (those who have been to India as missionaries or followers of religious gurus of India) or have research interests on India who have also joined the group. In this paper, we will demonstrate how a virtual community of Asian Indians developed over the years on cyberspace and how it is helping the community. The insights provided in this paper would be of help to others interested in meeting the needs of small communities scattered around the globe in an effective way. In general, news and discussion groups are a way to keep people in touch with others with similar interests. The nature of human beings is to find someone with a similar background and culture. This particularly become important when people are displaced from their roots in countries and continents that are drastically different from their home country and cultures. The Asian Indian immigration took an upward turn with the United States relaxing its immigration rules in 1965. The India Network as it became known later had a very humble beginning and for one personal reason. It was fall 1988 that I joined the Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA, where I did not find it easy to gain access to news related to India. Local newspapers publish stories from India only when there is a large disaster and fill their pages with local news. As such, the general news of interest from India or other countries generally do not receive any attention from the local media. I consulted a few friends in the Computer Sciences area to
Table 2 Distribution
by region and sex, 1980 and 1990 Percentage
Region
Males
Females
Total
1980 Northeast Midwest West South Total
75 140 49 560 42 600 50400 217700
69 840 41440 38 700 47 loo 197 080
144 980 91000 81300 97 500 414780
100.0
1990 Northeast Midwest West South Total
156923 81795 115093 I10862 464 673
144319 71978 96244 92 686 405 227
301242 153 773 211337 203 548 869 900
34.6 17.7 24.3 23.4 100.0
Sources: Refs. [5,8].
35.0 21.9 19.6 23.5
investigate whether they can help gain access to the news groups or other Internet resources on India. It became clear that there was no listserv (a program that delivers e-mail messages to a list of people who have some common interest) list on India. We exchanged ideas among a group of about 50 people at various campuses and came to the conclusion that we required a mailing list to serve the needs of individual Asian Indians and people interested in India. Thus the need for a list of people who have common interest in India and information related to India has been established. An examination of demographics of Asian Indians is presented in the next section to demonstrate the exponential growth of this ethnic community in the last decade and their spread across the country. When the listserv list was planned, we did not consider international readership as Internet was relatively unknown in many parts of the world. Even in the United States, the Internet in 1988 was seen by many colleagues as something requiring a lot of skill and hence e-mail was limited to people with a computer background. Demographics show that Asian Indian population in the United States and Canada is growing exponentially due to immigration and natural increase (births to immigrants) in the last decade [4]. It is expected that more than a million people of Asian Indian origin call United States home in 1996. Table 1 shows the Asian Indian population in the United States in 1980 and 1990 and the increase percentage over the decade. The higher growth of Asian Indian population in the 1990s can be attributed mainly to changes in immigration laws that facilitated immigration of scholars and families of residents. The backlog of Asian Indians waiting for their immigration numbers also increased due to per country quota established by the United States. Thus the immigration issue became an important problem faced by Asian Indian community, but there was no mechanism to share the knowledge. There was a need to provide advice and share information on immigration matters that has not been met by any other media. Although some ethnic press newspapers such as ‘India Abroad’ and ‘India West’ have columns on immigration in their weekly publications, they have not been able to provide a public forum for exchange of information. Only the Internet and cyberspace can provide such a forum in a timely manner. This is something that the India Network took into consideration and we have started an immigration law forum in 1995 with the assistance of an attorney who volunteered her services to help answer questions on immigration through our India Network digest. Table 2 shows the regional distribution of Asian Indians in the United States in 1980 and 1990. The table shows an obvious concentration of Asian Indians in the Northeast, West and Southern regions. Detailed discussion on the regional distribution of Asian Indians in the United States is presented elsewhere [5]. A quick examination of the distribution by cities and states show that Asian Indians, although concentrated at some pockets, are widespread in
K.V. Rae/Computer
ce:
1990
PIJMS data
Communications
20 (1998) 1527-1533
1529
Population in Percent(s)
Fig. 1. I990 USA Asian Indian population
small localities and neighbourhoods around the country. Due to this reason, no survey sampling method can provide a probability sample for this ethnic group in the United States. This is similar to the case with Chinese and other Asian groups which immigrated to the US in recent decades. As we demonstrate later in this paper, the Internet provides an excellent opportunity to reach the Asian Indian community, although the question of reliability and representativeness still need to be dealt with. Fig. 1 shows the distribution of Asian Indians by age and gender. The pyramid confirms our earlier assertion that the Asian Indian immigration is more recent and have a younger age structure than the receiving country. In addition, the pyramid shows that there are more males than females. Recent increases in demand for software professionals from India in the United States has meant that most young migrants are computer literate and work in computer-related industries as consultants. This is yet another reason why the India Network could reach thousands of Asian Indians through our electronic mail and web services.
2. Procedures
established
The first step in starting a list was to configure a mailing list from an individual account. We used a simple mail program to collect all messages sent to us by members and sent them out to the list of participants maintained manually on the system. The news and information about India were received at a central location from members. The items were either found in other sources, newspapers or from personal telephone calls to India. We continued this system of arrangement for a period of 3 months and found that it is almost impossible to manually attend to subscription requests and keep track of error messages bouncing back due to faulty e-mail addresses. At this time in 1988, we posted a request in the listserv managers list seeking their help to host our list. The listserv program is a mailing list program that automates many of the functions that we have to manually attend to in our configuration. The systems
manager from the University of Texas at Arlington responded to our call and offered help. As we learned later, he just installed listserv software on his system and would like to test out some lists. It was a mutually beneficial move. The India Interest Group (the name we started with) list moved to the listserv site at the University of Texas at Arlington within a month and we started distributing messages using the listserv list. One of the attractive features of this list is that a list owner can be anywhere on the Internet and be able to attend to the list administration through executing commands sent via electronic mail. The India Network thus started as a listserv list in 1989, opening the automatic subscription and sign off to people around the world. The India Network was started with just one list for everything to communicate to the group. The list known as INDIA-L (the L represents a listserv list-the convention that we retained has been abandoned by the Internet community in the last few years) carried all sorts of information of interest to Asian Indians. We have adopted sending individual items initially as they came and we soon found that it was creating network problems with bouncing mail and mail waiting in pipeline. Additionally, members soon found that they have limited time and they do not like to receive 10 or 1.5 mail messages from our list. A solution to this was found by collecting messages arriving in a 24 h period and putting them in a digest format. We presently follow this format as it was the best for everyone involved. The question of content came up for discussion as members increasingly diversified their interests, varying how much information they really wanted to receive every day. In response to member requests, we have split the INDIA-L list in to two lists: the INDIA-L, known as ‘The India News Network’ and the INDIA-D designated as ‘The India Discussion Digest’. The news articles were sent to members of the INDIA-L list and discussion digest was sent to the INDIA-D members. Thus it requires two sets of subscriptions if people want to receive both these publications. The maintenance of two lists coupled with an increase in subscriptions forced us to look for a peer server for the India Network. The University of Texas at Arlington
1530
K.V. Rae/Computer Communications 20 (1998) 1527-1533
(UTARLVMl) that provided the initial host services to us is located in one comer of the country and hence deliveries were taking longer and requiring more network travel. We have again approached the listserv managers list with a request for hosting peer servers for our network. The University of Kentucky (UKCC) and Temple University (TEMPLEVM) agreed to help us out by providing peer server service to our lists. The India news and discussion digests were thus delivered from three host sites in the United States to thousands of members around the world. This placed a very limited burden on the Bowling Green State University Computers (BGSU) where I am located. The owner of the list receives all e-mail messages and they are compiled and send back to one of the host computers for distribution among all peers. In addition, as the work load increased several volunteers at various campuses came forward to help me compile the digests and attend to subscribe requests from new members. Since we are an Internet-based community, the location of volunteers really did not come into the picture and it provided flexibility in identifying individuals who have expressed an interest in volunteering. The arrangement went smoothly for about 4 years and we experienced had no problems. The membership of the India Network often reflected a mini India with people from all states in India actively participating and sharing information about various regions of the country. It is wonderful to know that so many people with varied expertise in different parts of the country come together to share their thoughts about regions and locations that many might have only heard of, but have never really considered how daily life proceeds in that particular region. The India Network also provided information to many nonAsian Indians who have plans to visit India or educational material to many professors who teach Indian politics, history and culture at various campuses. With such a humble beginning a virtual community of Asian Indians around the world was born. Membership in the network is open to anyone interested in receiving the digests or information on India. The India Network so far has been a voluntary effort with the help of University computer centers hosting our lists. However, the Hindu/Muslim protests and other events in India have created a bitter division among members of the India Network. The Ramajanmabhoomi (the Birth Place of Lord Rama) issue tested the groups integrity and our own organizations strength to cope with diverse opinions. Some members took the drastic steps by writing to our host site administrators that India Network is indirectly promoting communal disharmony by allowing free discussion of Hindu/Muslim clashes and religious debates on its forums. As owner of the India Network, I never expressed my opinions on the matters and let the free discussion flow without any censoring. However, the host sites felt that they do not want their site to be dragged into any controversy and requested that we move the lists to some other location. At
this juncture, we have had very limited options-close down the network or build our own computer resources to be free from the threats and provide stability. The members overwhelmingly supported the idea of having our own resources and agreed to contribute funds to meet his goal. After this decision, we received a used Sun ELC workstation as a donation to the India Network from one of the members and that helped us start our own listserv site. The L-Soft International which owns the Listserv software agreed to provide us a unlimited license to use their product in exchange for carrying information about L-Soft on our digests. Thus voluntary contributions from members to the India Network Fund are sought on an annual basis to maintain the services. The network is managed by me at the Bowling Green State University with the assistance of a networksupported graduate student and several volunteers located at various university centers. We have developed a Group Health Insurance Plan for our members and several other services over the years. The funds were collected and managed by the Bowling Green State University Foundation for the India Network project. To meet the growing demands of the network, we have purchased a Spare 20 work station and 10 GB hard disk to hold the archives of our digests. The initial interest and support slowly reduced with the development of Internet and accessibility of news and other information from India at various web sites. At this juncture, some members suggested that we look at alternative methods to raise funds to the India Network. It was suggested that we issue a credit card and percentage of the charges made on that would benefit the India Network. A local was approached for issuing a credit card and they have shown interest and requested a profile of our membership. At this juncture, we have no idea on the profile of our membership and hence decided to field small questionnaire to supply the information required by the bank. It is important to note that the India Network is a cyberspace association where members do not see each other and are known only by their user IDS. Furthermore, members are united by a common interest in a geographical region or part of the world rather than by professional interests. All members of this group have e-mail accounts and are moderate to heavy users of the Internet and e-mail in everyday life. Membership has no physical boundaries. Hence we appealed to members living in the United States only to respond to the questions on credit card usage. Appendix A provides the questionnaire used in this survey.
3. The credit card study A questionnaire was quickly devised and posted to all our members through electronic mail. Only residents of the United States were asked to respond. Since this is our first survey, we were not sure about the confidentially of obtaining personal information and have not explored so far the
K. V. RadCmpurrr Table 3 Respondent
1531
Communications 20 (1998) 1527- 1533 Table 4 Type of credit cards possessed by the sample respondents
profile based on domains
Domain name
Number
Education (.edu) Commercial (.com) Government (.gov) Organization (.org) Network (.net) Military (.mil) Other (mire) Total
791 875 50 37 22 9 296 2080
Percentage 38.03 42.07 2.40
I .78 I .06 0.43 14.23 100
value of our mailing list for this type of studies on ethnic groups as widespread as Asian Indians are in the United States. We have received 2038 responses by e-mail and it took a long time to process them. One of the problems with e-mail surveys is that people use a variety of systems and many systems process the e-mail differently, creating a chaotic condition. Only with careful planning in conducting the surveys over Internet can savings in time and money be achieved. In addition, due to confidentiality issues, we have not requested any personal information. Later we try to make sense of the data and try to generate some pseudodemographics based on e-mail address, the only aspect of personal information available to us. Preliminary results of the survey have been presented at the last Population Association of America meetings [6]. Table 3 shows the respondent profile based on e-mail domains. In the USA, these domains have special significance. The .EDU domain is assigned to educational institutions, .COM domain is for commercial business enterprises, etc. In extending this logic, we have drawn some general profile of our respondents based on the domains their e-mail address came from. It is not necessarily the best way to proceed since many commercial providers such AOL (America On-line) give accounts to all types of people. The data shows that about 42% of our respondents used a commercial domain e-mail address and 38% originated from educational institutions. These are the two main sectors that employ most of our respondents. Table 4 shows the type of card possessed by our members. It appears that 37% of our members use a VISA card compared to 32.5% using a Master card. VISA and Master Card are the two prominent cards used by Americans and around the world. About 11% have Discover and American Express cards, respectively. The Discover card is limited to the United States and offers a 1% payback depending on the volume of charges in a given year. The analysis of credit card study data shows that Asian Indian group is not very keen on the interest rates of the cards, but they would like to have a card that has no annual fees and will pay a percentage back to them at the end of each year. About 95% regularly pay their card balances and
Card name
Frequency
Master Card VISA Discover American Express
1104 1265 362 396 198 70 3395
Department Store Other card Total cards
Percentage 32.5 37.3 10.7
Il.7 5.8 2.1 100
hence are not worried about interest rates. While this group may be excellent in repayment of their credit card balances, the banks are not very keen to issue a credit card to a group that is not likely to generate revenues in interest payments. Hence the bank decided to drop the proposal of issuing a credit card to the India Network. Although the credit card study did not work out in favour of us, it did provide a great opportunity for us to test whether such studies were feasible and whether the India Network data base can be employed to collect information from small ethnic groups that are difficult to reach through any sampling scheme. We have recently launched a membership survey where we requested more detailed information on our membership as well as demographics. We have published that questionnaire on our web and used our earlier experience in designing this study. As with any other organization, the growing activities of India Network necessitated separation of our activities from the Bowling Green State University. In 1996, we have formed a nonprofit and tax-exempt organization called The India Network Foundation to take charge of the activities of the India Network and play an active role in the developmental work in India. The India Network Foundation took extensive relief work to cyclone victims in Andhra Pradesh recently and continue to work for the Asian India community around the world,
4. Summary In this paper we have discussed the birth and growth of a cyberspace community of Asian Indians around the world. The advent of Internet and the availability of e-mail facilitated communication among people who have common interest in India. The organization also has the potential to become an excellent resources for research on India and Asian Indians abroad. Many displays of volunteering and much dedication of relatively few members to see the network through its hard times make it a unique and perhaps the oldest network still in existence on cyberspace, a medium where things change so rapidly!
1532
K. V. Rae/Computer
Communications
Appendix A India Network credit card surveyDecember 1994 Friends, Seasons Greetings and Happy and Prosperous News year to everyone of you and your loved ones. The year 1994 has been a significant year for the India Network in terms of our resources. We have recently started our gopher server and World Web Server and please visit these sites and send in your suggestions. At ready prompt: gopher indnet.org (to try our gopher). You have to have access to MOSAIC or NETSCAPE or similar program to view the WWW: Our WWW address is: http://www.indnet.org/index.html.
THE INDIA NETWORK CREDIT CARD We have also made some attempts to issue our own credit card in co-operation with a local bank. Given the nature of our membership and operation, I have no ideas on the prospective customer profile that the bank would like to know before they commit their resources. In this context may I request you to take few minutes of your time and fill in the following questions that the bank is interested in knowing the answers to. Please put ‘Survey’ in the subject line and mail the answers to: [email protected] (PLEASE NOTE THAT NO E-MAIL/ADDRESS WILL BE PROVIDED TO THE BANK OR ANY OTHER AGENCY AND ONLY SUMMARY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE TO THEM) ONLY US RESIDENTS NEED TO FILL-UP THE QUESTIONNAIRE-OTHERS PLEASE IGNORE (CITIZENS, GCS, Fl, Hl, Jl, PI, Bl ETC. all are eligible!)
QUESTIONNAIRE -CUSTOMER INFORMATION1. What type of credit card do you have now and use most often? (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)
Master Card (Reg./Gold) Visa (Reg./Gold) Discover American Express Dept. Store/Gas Station Other (write the name)
(g) None 2. How often do you revolve a balance on a credit card? (a) (b) (c) (d)
Every month Two three times a year Never Other
20 (1998) 1527-1533
3. Would you pay an annual fee for a credit card? (a) Yes (b) No 4. Would you be willing to pay an annual fee for a credit card that used part of that fee to support India Network? (a) Yes (b) No 5. What are your average monthly purchases on credit cards? What type of transactions do you typically use a credit card for? (a) Travel (b) Gifts (c) Clothing (d) Electronics (e) Entertainment (f) Other (indicate) 7. Is the interest rate on a credit card an important to you?
factor
(a) Yes (b) No 8. Would you be willing to sign-on to a India Network card if such a card is issued? (a) Yes (a) Yes only if no annual fees (b) No Thanks for your co-operation questionnaire.
in completing
the above
References [I ] Nielsen Media Research, Internet Demographic Analysis of Poststratification weighting Procedures, CommerNet/Nielsen, USA, 1996. [2] FIND/SVP, The American Internet User Survey: New Survey Highlights, Emerging Technology Research Group, FIND/SVP, USA, 1996. [3] D. Hoffman, W.D. Kalsbeek, T.P. Novak, Internet Use in the United States: 1995 Baseline Estimates and Preliminary Market Segments, Project 2000, Vanderbelt University, USA, 1996. [4] US Department of Justice, INS Fact Book: summary of recent immigration data, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1994. [5] K.V. Rao, Growth and Structure of Asian Indian Population in the United States, 1980- 1990, Demography India 25 (2) ( 1996) 35-60. [6] K.V. Rao, Credit card use among Asian Indians in the United States, Paper presented at the Population Association of America meetings, Washington, DC, March 1997. [7] G.K. Singh, Immigration, nativity and socio-economic assimilation of Asian Indians in the United States, University Microfilms Intemational, Ann Arbor, I99 I [8] P. Xenos, H. Bat-ringer, M. Levitt, Asian Indians in the United States: a 1980 census profile, no. I1 I, Papers of the East-West Population Institute, 1989.
K.V. Rao/Cornputer
Doctor Associate
K.V.
Rao
Professor
is
currently
and director
working
Communications
as
of the Applied
Demography program at the Bowing Green State University. He is the Founder and President of the India Network Foundation in the United States. The INF is the first of its kind in the world, representing a virtual commanil?, of members connected through electronic mail. His research interests are demography of India and Canada and applications of demographic tools in market and buisness research. He has published several articles and is the author or co-author of several books in the field of demography.
20 (1998)
1527-1533
1533
Computer Communications 20
India Network-the
(I 998)
1527-
I533
first case study of a virtual community K.V. Rae*
Abstract In this paper. we describe the historical development of a virtual community of Asian Indians and how the Internet helped create such a network. The Indian Network is the oldest e-mail network serving the Asian Indian community around the world. Although it is physically located in the United States, it serves members in more than 75 countries, providing them with news, information and advice. A detailed discussion on problems and issues in establishing an Internet-based network is provided in the paper. In addition, the advantages of the Internet in building a virtual community of immigrant populations separated by thousands of miles physically, but just an e-mail away are outlined. This paper will be of use to those interested in developing community networks for other communities. It will also help experts in computer science and information technology develop software tools to meet the challenges in aiding development of virtual communities. Another important contribution of these specialized lists is our ability to reach the community for research purposes which otherwise would be impossible. The credit card usage study and membership survey results are discussed towards the end of the paper. 0 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. Kqwnrds:
Asian Indians; Internet communication;
Virtual community
1. Introduction A recent upsurge in the use of the Internet by people other than computer scientists created numerous opportunities to communities spread across the nation and around the world. The Internet provided a fast and efficient way to reach people having similar interests, but spread over continents. It also provided instant access to exchange of information and for networking among groups. As a culture, the Internet has provided an instant opportunity to communicate with everyone and anyone irrespective of their position and rank in an informal way. It is estimated that virtually all offices are Internet-connected in the United States either by their own networks with their own domain names or with the assistance from commercial service providers such as America Online, Compuserve, etc. The Internet connectivity to schools has been the top priority of the current administration in the United States. The Internet also helped to remove the barriers of access to information and help reduce the difference between big and small companies since they all share the same Internet web space in the same way. Internet can be seen as a global phenomenon creating a world with no boundaries and a powerful medium that made distances irrelevant in building communities. The * Tel.:
419.372
7240: fax: 419 372 8306; e-mail: [email protected]
0140-3664/98/$19.00
0
PII SO 140.3664(97)00
1998 Elsevier
159-X
Science B.V. AI1 rights reserved
India Network is such a virtual community of consisting of people of Asian Indian region living in more than 75 countries around the world. In this paper, we describe building a virtual community using Internet and provide an insight into the problems and issues in developing such a community. A recent survey of Nielsen Media Research [l] shows that one in four Americans have Internet access and it is estimated that more than 50 million people in the US and Canada surf the Internet on a regular basis. Once dominated by males, the Internet community is now attracting about 2 1 million women in Canada and United States. It is estimated that the access to Internet in the United States would reach the level of telephone access, which is about 94% in less than a decade [2,3]). The growth in Internet use can be attributed to the ease of access and low costs of access in the US. Although the Internet has not reached the levels of US usage in other parts of the world, it is expected to grow exponentially, reaching millions living in all parts of the world in the next few years. The Internet connectivity provides an excellent opportunity for people living far away from each other to feel at home with an exchange of e-mails and other information through the Internet. This is particularly so with the global community of Asian Indians. The expatriate Asian Indians as a group are highly educated, and were eagar to take advantage of new technologies to keep in touch with
K.V. Rae/Computer Communications 20 (1998) 1527-1533
1528
Table 1 Asian Indians in the United States, 1980 and 1990 Gender
1980
1990
Increase
Percentage increase
Male Female Total
217700 197080 414780
464 673 405 227 869 900
246 973 208 147 455 120
1 13.4 105.6 109.7
Source: US Census, 1980 and 1990. Refs. [5,7].
happenings at home. There are several others who have developed an interest either through developmental work done or through participation in religious work (those who have been to India as missionaries or followers of religious gurus of India) or have research interests on India who have also joined the group. In this paper, we will demonstrate how a virtual community of Asian Indians developed over the years on cyberspace and how it is helping the community. The insights provided in this paper would be of help to others interested in meeting the needs of small communities scattered around the globe in an effective way. In general, news and discussion groups are a way to keep people in touch with others with similar interests. The nature of human beings is to find someone with a similar background and culture. This particularly become important when people are displaced from their roots in countries and continents that are drastically different from their home country and cultures. The Asian Indian immigration took an upward turn with the United States relaxing its immigration rules in 1965. The India Network as it became known later had a very humble beginning and for one personal reason. It was fall 1988 that I joined the Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA, where I did not find it easy to gain access to news related to India. Local newspapers publish stories from India only when there is a large disaster and fill their pages with local news. As such, the general news of interest from India or other countries generally do not receive any attention from the local media. I consulted a few friends in the Computer Sciences area to
Table 2 Distribution
by region and sex, 1980 and 1990 Percentage
Region
Males
Females
Total
1980 Northeast Midwest West South Total
75 140 49 560 42 600 50400 217700
69 840 41440 38 700 47 loo 197 080
144 980 91000 81300 97 500 414780
100.0
1990 Northeast Midwest West South Total
156923 81795 115093 I10862 464 673
144319 71978 96244 92 686 405 227
301242 153 773 211337 203 548 869 900
34.6 17.7 24.3 23.4 100.0
Sources: Refs. [5,8].
35.0 21.9 19.6 23.5
investigate whether they can help gain access to the news groups or other Internet resources on India. It became clear that there was no listserv (a program that delivers e-mail messages to a list of people who have some common interest) list on India. We exchanged ideas among a group of about 50 people at various campuses and came to the conclusion that we required a mailing list to serve the needs of individual Asian Indians and people interested in India. Thus the need for a list of people who have common interest in India and information related to India has been established. An examination of demographics of Asian Indians is presented in the next section to demonstrate the exponential growth of this ethnic community in the last decade and their spread across the country. When the listserv list was planned, we did not consider international readership as Internet was relatively unknown in many parts of the world. Even in the United States, the Internet in 1988 was seen by many colleagues as something requiring a lot of skill and hence e-mail was limited to people with a computer background. Demographics show that Asian Indian population in the United States and Canada is growing exponentially due to immigration and natural increase (births to immigrants) in the last decade [4]. It is expected that more than a million people of Asian Indian origin call United States home in 1996. Table 1 shows the Asian Indian population in the United States in 1980 and 1990 and the increase percentage over the decade. The higher growth of Asian Indian population in the 1990s can be attributed mainly to changes in immigration laws that facilitated immigration of scholars and families of residents. The backlog of Asian Indians waiting for their immigration numbers also increased due to per country quota established by the United States. Thus the immigration issue became an important problem faced by Asian Indian community, but there was no mechanism to share the knowledge. There was a need to provide advice and share information on immigration matters that has not been met by any other media. Although some ethnic press newspapers such as ‘India Abroad’ and ‘India West’ have columns on immigration in their weekly publications, they have not been able to provide a public forum for exchange of information. Only the Internet and cyberspace can provide such a forum in a timely manner. This is something that the India Network took into consideration and we have started an immigration law forum in 1995 with the assistance of an attorney who volunteered her services to help answer questions on immigration through our India Network digest. Table 2 shows the regional distribution of Asian Indians in the United States in 1980 and 1990. The table shows an obvious concentration of Asian Indians in the Northeast, West and Southern regions. Detailed discussion on the regional distribution of Asian Indians in the United States is presented elsewhere [5]. A quick examination of the distribution by cities and states show that Asian Indians, although concentrated at some pockets, are widespread in
K.V. Rae/Computer
ce:
1990
PIJMS data
Communications
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Population in Percent(s)
Fig. 1. I990 USA Asian Indian population
small localities and neighbourhoods around the country. Due to this reason, no survey sampling method can provide a probability sample for this ethnic group in the United States. This is similar to the case with Chinese and other Asian groups which immigrated to the US in recent decades. As we demonstrate later in this paper, the Internet provides an excellent opportunity to reach the Asian Indian community, although the question of reliability and representativeness still need to be dealt with. Fig. 1 shows the distribution of Asian Indians by age and gender. The pyramid confirms our earlier assertion that the Asian Indian immigration is more recent and have a younger age structure than the receiving country. In addition, the pyramid shows that there are more males than females. Recent increases in demand for software professionals from India in the United States has meant that most young migrants are computer literate and work in computer-related industries as consultants. This is yet another reason why the India Network could reach thousands of Asian Indians through our electronic mail and web services.
2. Procedures
established
The first step in starting a list was to configure a mailing list from an individual account. We used a simple mail program to collect all messages sent to us by members and sent them out to the list of participants maintained manually on the system. The news and information about India were received at a central location from members. The items were either found in other sources, newspapers or from personal telephone calls to India. We continued this system of arrangement for a period of 3 months and found that it is almost impossible to manually attend to subscription requests and keep track of error messages bouncing back due to faulty e-mail addresses. At this time in 1988, we posted a request in the listserv managers list seeking their help to host our list. The listserv program is a mailing list program that automates many of the functions that we have to manually attend to in our configuration. The systems
manager from the University of Texas at Arlington responded to our call and offered help. As we learned later, he just installed listserv software on his system and would like to test out some lists. It was a mutually beneficial move. The India Interest Group (the name we started with) list moved to the listserv site at the University of Texas at Arlington within a month and we started distributing messages using the listserv list. One of the attractive features of this list is that a list owner can be anywhere on the Internet and be able to attend to the list administration through executing commands sent via electronic mail. The India Network thus started as a listserv list in 1989, opening the automatic subscription and sign off to people around the world. The India Network was started with just one list for everything to communicate to the group. The list known as INDIA-L (the L represents a listserv list-the convention that we retained has been abandoned by the Internet community in the last few years) carried all sorts of information of interest to Asian Indians. We have adopted sending individual items initially as they came and we soon found that it was creating network problems with bouncing mail and mail waiting in pipeline. Additionally, members soon found that they have limited time and they do not like to receive 10 or 1.5 mail messages from our list. A solution to this was found by collecting messages arriving in a 24 h period and putting them in a digest format. We presently follow this format as it was the best for everyone involved. The question of content came up for discussion as members increasingly diversified their interests, varying how much information they really wanted to receive every day. In response to member requests, we have split the INDIA-L list in to two lists: the INDIA-L, known as ‘The India News Network’ and the INDIA-D designated as ‘The India Discussion Digest’. The news articles were sent to members of the INDIA-L list and discussion digest was sent to the INDIA-D members. Thus it requires two sets of subscriptions if people want to receive both these publications. The maintenance of two lists coupled with an increase in subscriptions forced us to look for a peer server for the India Network. The University of Texas at Arlington
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(UTARLVMl) that provided the initial host services to us is located in one comer of the country and hence deliveries were taking longer and requiring more network travel. We have again approached the listserv managers list with a request for hosting peer servers for our network. The University of Kentucky (UKCC) and Temple University (TEMPLEVM) agreed to help us out by providing peer server service to our lists. The India news and discussion digests were thus delivered from three host sites in the United States to thousands of members around the world. This placed a very limited burden on the Bowling Green State University Computers (BGSU) where I am located. The owner of the list receives all e-mail messages and they are compiled and send back to one of the host computers for distribution among all peers. In addition, as the work load increased several volunteers at various campuses came forward to help me compile the digests and attend to subscribe requests from new members. Since we are an Internet-based community, the location of volunteers really did not come into the picture and it provided flexibility in identifying individuals who have expressed an interest in volunteering. The arrangement went smoothly for about 4 years and we experienced had no problems. The membership of the India Network often reflected a mini India with people from all states in India actively participating and sharing information about various regions of the country. It is wonderful to know that so many people with varied expertise in different parts of the country come together to share their thoughts about regions and locations that many might have only heard of, but have never really considered how daily life proceeds in that particular region. The India Network also provided information to many nonAsian Indians who have plans to visit India or educational material to many professors who teach Indian politics, history and culture at various campuses. With such a humble beginning a virtual community of Asian Indians around the world was born. Membership in the network is open to anyone interested in receiving the digests or information on India. The India Network so far has been a voluntary effort with the help of University computer centers hosting our lists. However, the Hindu/Muslim protests and other events in India have created a bitter division among members of the India Network. The Ramajanmabhoomi (the Birth Place of Lord Rama) issue tested the groups integrity and our own organizations strength to cope with diverse opinions. Some members took the drastic steps by writing to our host site administrators that India Network is indirectly promoting communal disharmony by allowing free discussion of Hindu/Muslim clashes and religious debates on its forums. As owner of the India Network, I never expressed my opinions on the matters and let the free discussion flow without any censoring. However, the host sites felt that they do not want their site to be dragged into any controversy and requested that we move the lists to some other location. At
this juncture, we have had very limited options-close down the network or build our own computer resources to be free from the threats and provide stability. The members overwhelmingly supported the idea of having our own resources and agreed to contribute funds to meet his goal. After this decision, we received a used Sun ELC workstation as a donation to the India Network from one of the members and that helped us start our own listserv site. The L-Soft International which owns the Listserv software agreed to provide us a unlimited license to use their product in exchange for carrying information about L-Soft on our digests. Thus voluntary contributions from members to the India Network Fund are sought on an annual basis to maintain the services. The network is managed by me at the Bowling Green State University with the assistance of a networksupported graduate student and several volunteers located at various university centers. We have developed a Group Health Insurance Plan for our members and several other services over the years. The funds were collected and managed by the Bowling Green State University Foundation for the India Network project. To meet the growing demands of the network, we have purchased a Spare 20 work station and 10 GB hard disk to hold the archives of our digests. The initial interest and support slowly reduced with the development of Internet and accessibility of news and other information from India at various web sites. At this juncture, some members suggested that we look at alternative methods to raise funds to the India Network. It was suggested that we issue a credit card and percentage of the charges made on that would benefit the India Network. A local was approached for issuing a credit card and they have shown interest and requested a profile of our membership. At this juncture, we have no idea on the profile of our membership and hence decided to field small questionnaire to supply the information required by the bank. It is important to note that the India Network is a cyberspace association where members do not see each other and are known only by their user IDS. Furthermore, members are united by a common interest in a geographical region or part of the world rather than by professional interests. All members of this group have e-mail accounts and are moderate to heavy users of the Internet and e-mail in everyday life. Membership has no physical boundaries. Hence we appealed to members living in the United States only to respond to the questions on credit card usage. Appendix A provides the questionnaire used in this survey.
3. The credit card study A questionnaire was quickly devised and posted to all our members through electronic mail. Only residents of the United States were asked to respond. Since this is our first survey, we were not sure about the confidentially of obtaining personal information and have not explored so far the
K. V. RadCmpurrr Table 3 Respondent
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Communications 20 (1998) 1527- 1533 Table 4 Type of credit cards possessed by the sample respondents
profile based on domains
Domain name
Number
Education (.edu) Commercial (.com) Government (.gov) Organization (.org) Network (.net) Military (.mil) Other (mire) Total
791 875 50 37 22 9 296 2080
Percentage 38.03 42.07 2.40
I .78 I .06 0.43 14.23 100
value of our mailing list for this type of studies on ethnic groups as widespread as Asian Indians are in the United States. We have received 2038 responses by e-mail and it took a long time to process them. One of the problems with e-mail surveys is that people use a variety of systems and many systems process the e-mail differently, creating a chaotic condition. Only with careful planning in conducting the surveys over Internet can savings in time and money be achieved. In addition, due to confidentiality issues, we have not requested any personal information. Later we try to make sense of the data and try to generate some pseudodemographics based on e-mail address, the only aspect of personal information available to us. Preliminary results of the survey have been presented at the last Population Association of America meetings [6]. Table 3 shows the respondent profile based on e-mail domains. In the USA, these domains have special significance. The .EDU domain is assigned to educational institutions, .COM domain is for commercial business enterprises, etc. In extending this logic, we have drawn some general profile of our respondents based on the domains their e-mail address came from. It is not necessarily the best way to proceed since many commercial providers such AOL (America On-line) give accounts to all types of people. The data shows that about 42% of our respondents used a commercial domain e-mail address and 38% originated from educational institutions. These are the two main sectors that employ most of our respondents. Table 4 shows the type of card possessed by our members. It appears that 37% of our members use a VISA card compared to 32.5% using a Master card. VISA and Master Card are the two prominent cards used by Americans and around the world. About 11% have Discover and American Express cards, respectively. The Discover card is limited to the United States and offers a 1% payback depending on the volume of charges in a given year. The analysis of credit card study data shows that Asian Indian group is not very keen on the interest rates of the cards, but they would like to have a card that has no annual fees and will pay a percentage back to them at the end of each year. About 95% regularly pay their card balances and
Card name
Frequency
Master Card VISA Discover American Express
1104 1265 362 396 198 70 3395
Department Store Other card Total cards
Percentage 32.5 37.3 10.7
Il.7 5.8 2.1 100
hence are not worried about interest rates. While this group may be excellent in repayment of their credit card balances, the banks are not very keen to issue a credit card to a group that is not likely to generate revenues in interest payments. Hence the bank decided to drop the proposal of issuing a credit card to the India Network. Although the credit card study did not work out in favour of us, it did provide a great opportunity for us to test whether such studies were feasible and whether the India Network data base can be employed to collect information from small ethnic groups that are difficult to reach through any sampling scheme. We have recently launched a membership survey where we requested more detailed information on our membership as well as demographics. We have published that questionnaire on our web and used our earlier experience in designing this study. As with any other organization, the growing activities of India Network necessitated separation of our activities from the Bowling Green State University. In 1996, we have formed a nonprofit and tax-exempt organization called The India Network Foundation to take charge of the activities of the India Network and play an active role in the developmental work in India. The India Network Foundation took extensive relief work to cyclone victims in Andhra Pradesh recently and continue to work for the Asian India community around the world,
4. Summary In this paper we have discussed the birth and growth of a cyberspace community of Asian Indians around the world. The advent of Internet and the availability of e-mail facilitated communication among people who have common interest in India. The organization also has the potential to become an excellent resources for research on India and Asian Indians abroad. Many displays of volunteering and much dedication of relatively few members to see the network through its hard times make it a unique and perhaps the oldest network still in existence on cyberspace, a medium where things change so rapidly!
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Appendix A India Network credit card surveyDecember 1994 Friends, Seasons Greetings and Happy and Prosperous News year to everyone of you and your loved ones. The year 1994 has been a significant year for the India Network in terms of our resources. We have recently started our gopher server and World Web Server and please visit these sites and send in your suggestions. At ready prompt: gopher indnet.org (to try our gopher). You have to have access to MOSAIC or NETSCAPE or similar program to view the WWW: Our WWW address is: http://www.indnet.org/index.html.
THE INDIA NETWORK CREDIT CARD We have also made some attempts to issue our own credit card in co-operation with a local bank. Given the nature of our membership and operation, I have no ideas on the prospective customer profile that the bank would like to know before they commit their resources. In this context may I request you to take few minutes of your time and fill in the following questions that the bank is interested in knowing the answers to. Please put ‘Survey’ in the subject line and mail the answers to: [email protected] (PLEASE NOTE THAT NO E-MAIL/ADDRESS WILL BE PROVIDED TO THE BANK OR ANY OTHER AGENCY AND ONLY SUMMARY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE TO THEM) ONLY US RESIDENTS NEED TO FILL-UP THE QUESTIONNAIRE-OTHERS PLEASE IGNORE (CITIZENS, GCS, Fl, Hl, Jl, PI, Bl ETC. all are eligible!)
QUESTIONNAIRE -CUSTOMER INFORMATION1. What type of credit card do you have now and use most often? (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)
Master Card (Reg./Gold) Visa (Reg./Gold) Discover American Express Dept. Store/Gas Station Other (write the name)
(g) None 2. How often do you revolve a balance on a credit card? (a) (b) (c) (d)
Every month Two three times a year Never Other
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3. Would you pay an annual fee for a credit card? (a) Yes (b) No 4. Would you be willing to pay an annual fee for a credit card that used part of that fee to support India Network? (a) Yes (b) No 5. What are your average monthly purchases on credit cards? What type of transactions do you typically use a credit card for? (a) Travel (b) Gifts (c) Clothing (d) Electronics (e) Entertainment (f) Other (indicate) 7. Is the interest rate on a credit card an important to you?
factor
(a) Yes (b) No 8. Would you be willing to sign-on to a India Network card if such a card is issued? (a) Yes (a) Yes only if no annual fees (b) No Thanks for your co-operation questionnaire.
in completing
the above
References [I ] Nielsen Media Research, Internet Demographic Analysis of Poststratification weighting Procedures, CommerNet/Nielsen, USA, 1996. [2] FIND/SVP, The American Internet User Survey: New Survey Highlights, Emerging Technology Research Group, FIND/SVP, USA, 1996. [3] D. Hoffman, W.D. Kalsbeek, T.P. Novak, Internet Use in the United States: 1995 Baseline Estimates and Preliminary Market Segments, Project 2000, Vanderbelt University, USA, 1996. [4] US Department of Justice, INS Fact Book: summary of recent immigration data, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1994. [5] K.V. Rao, Growth and Structure of Asian Indian Population in the United States, 1980- 1990, Demography India 25 (2) ( 1996) 35-60. [6] K.V. Rao, Credit card use among Asian Indians in the United States, Paper presented at the Population Association of America meetings, Washington, DC, March 1997. [7] G.K. Singh, Immigration, nativity and socio-economic assimilation of Asian Indians in the United States, University Microfilms Intemational, Ann Arbor, I99 I [8] P. Xenos, H. Bat-ringer, M. Levitt, Asian Indians in the United States: a 1980 census profile, no. I1 I, Papers of the East-West Population Institute, 1989.
K.V. Rao/Cornputer
Doctor Associate
K.V.
Rao
Professor
is
currently
and director
working
Communications
as
of the Applied
Demography program at the Bowing Green State University. He is the Founder and President of the India Network Foundation in the United States. The INF is the first of its kind in the world, representing a virtual commanil?, of members connected through electronic mail. His research interests are demography of India and Canada and applications of demographic tools in market and buisness research. He has published several articles and is the author or co-author of several books in the field of demography.
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