Chapter 3 illustrated how the Internet's interactive components become an efficient, easy-access tool for diaspora storytelling and sharing, enabling members to make sense of their experiences and feelings in the encounter between cultures and identities. Over time, these interactive processes create on-line communities and organizations. This chapter examines how these cyberspaces become communities. I present two cyber-grassroots organizations (CGOs), AfghanistanOnline and Somalinet. Each organization retains few, if any, offline resources. They are truly cyber-grassroots organizations in which the bulk of organization activities take place only online. The websites associated with each have substantial interactive components, such as online discussion boards, which facilitate communication between and among members. The use of these interactive components make these cases living communities and organizations (as characterized by Weick 1979, 1995), complete with interpersonal communication, a range of member benefits – most especially solidary benefits, and rule making.What follows is a brief discussion of community formation and outcomes.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND CYBERCOMMUNITIES

The contribution of IT to diaspora identity and potential mobilization begins with the Internet's enabling features for the formation of voluntary communities. A voluntary community has three defining conditions: low barriers to entry, low barriers to exit, and nonhierarchical and noncoercive (Galston 2002). These characteristics are highly relevant to dispersed diasporans who may be experiencing identity stress. Communities – and especially virtual communities – are developed based on the expression or eliciting of feeling/emotion and communication/discussion (see Rheingold 1993).