Joshua Hal - J.O.S.H.
Joining Outpost 10F (OTF) on October 10, 1997, that is just about two months after the first chatroom was created by Andrew Maxwell, I was active in and around the community for roughly three and a half years until early 2001. It was a very exciting time during which I saw OTF grow from a small website called "Ten Forward - An Interactive Star Trek Chat" and hosted on Andrew's university account into a 2,000+ member community. I had a great time travelling to several unions, including the very first union in Amsterdam 1998 and the first official union in Las Vegas 1999. In 2004, I came back for a brief stint to finish the construction of our Lord of the Rings chatroom Minas Tirith.
Until July 23, 1999, I contributed to OTF as a member of the Department of Engineering, since June 15, 1998, as OTF's Chief Engineer leading a team of ten people. After leaving Engineering, my focus shifted towards working on the core functionality of OTF, restructuring and optimizing the chat and community support scripts and creating the first database for membership administration. As of this writing, I'm loosely associated with the Internal Development division of OTF Administrations, however I do not contribute actively anymore.
In my opinion, OTF was and still is a unique site on the Internet. Neither looking at the community nor at the technology alone would capture the whole that is OTF. During the time at which the site was founded, large scale community involvement was still very rare and no one was really trying to push this concept as a corner stone for a successful site (a notable exception is Slashdot which was founded around the same time and coincidentally relied on the same technology). OTF was different in that in encouraged all of its members to actively participate through the departments in the development of the site. The ranking structure gave expression to the meritocracy of the growing community. OTF is a site truly built by the community for the community. One can only wonder about the value created by all these people over time. As an indication, it is worth mentioning that as of this writing OTF is Google's #1 search hit for the terms "star trek chat", "star wars chat", and #3 for "lord of the rings chat".
On these pages, I would like to share some of the fun that I had with a lot of other people at the Outpost. Old friends from the community might recognize one or the other item on this page. To those people who have stumbled over this page by accident and have never been around OTF, I would like to recommend the novel "Rocket Boys" by Homer Hickam because its story manages to capture the air of excitement, awe, and fun that was all over OTF in the early years. Old OTFers might want to have a go at it as well. Finally, if you would like to know what I am currently up to, feel free to have a look at my homepage.
But now, without further ado, I hope you enjoy browsing through these pages!
-- Joshua Hal (joshua_hal@outpost10f.com)
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