a town called kozarac.ba

The best driver for online participation isn't Ajax - it is human need. What can we learn from those who connect online because their community has been damaged in the physical realm? What can diaspora teach about the motivation for online community?

The town of Kozarac was ethnically cleansed in 1992 and of the 24,00 mostly Bosniak citizens who survived, most were scattered around the world, and some came back to Bosnia to fight. At the end of the war, Kozarac was given by the Dayton Accords to the new ethnically-based Serbian Republic, and it took years before the people of Kozarac began returning to rebuild the town. Now it is a rare beacon of self-help and organisation among returnees on the wrong side of the inter-entity boundary line.

After the war, former soldiers from the famous Bosnian 17th Brigade, who led the fight for return joined with other returnees to set up an online community, internet centres and other media that provide a forum for the town to connect with the diaspora around the world to discuss, debate and organise its recreation. Initially, there were several related sites, but Kozarac.ba has emerged as the main forum and it is an extraordinary site with high traffic and rich patterns of usage for such a small and intimate community. The site has played a key bridging role in helping to repair an existing community that was temporarily removed from the map, quite literally.

I would like to examine some of site usage data, patterns of behaviour and overall character of Kozarac.ba as a case study to learn about how people behave online when they really need to be connected.