On February 21st of this year, a college student in Colorado sat down
at his computer terminal and started to type.  What came out was an
open resignation letter entitled "Malaclypse's Final Statement to
the Jihad", containing the following strong statements:

"The Jihad has been in a slump for more than two years. In those two years,
almost nothing has happened; no new blood was infused, few stories were written
(and even fewer released), and all the "active" Jihaddi did was sit around
on IRC and trade Linux tips and dumb cow jokes. I don't claim to have been
above that; I wasn't. I sat on IRC just as willingly as anybody else involved.

"For a long time, I treated the whole idea of 'The Jihad is Doomed' as just
another thing to mock the newbies and the occasional expatriate with. I think
that I had some justification for that; after all, during those moments of
internal strife, the Jihad managed to close ranks and stand together as a
community. It certainly looked like it was impossible to break.

"But now, I think the Jihad has fallen into a fatal apathy. Nobody has any
more real interest in the Jihad's activities. Only a handful want to continue
writing/role-playing in the fictional universe, and even less want to talk
about the real-world effects of a Barney-educated generation on society as
a whole.

[...]

"Therefore, as my last action as a Triumvir Praetor of the Jihad,
I am recommending to my partners in crime, Melanie Davies and Shadur,
that you and my successor draft a procedure for the orderly dissolution
of the Jihad, shutting down *.jihad.net, and ensuring that 
alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die is properly rmgrouped."

The rest of the members of this entity known as the Jihad reacted,
as predicted, with shock and anger.  None could deny the rightness
of the words which they were reading, as much as they wanted to
disagree with the recommendation.   Within a few days, the message
board to which the message had been posted was filled with posts
of people discussing what needed to be done to 'save the Jihad'.

In the process, they revealed a lot about themselves, and the ways
in which a community is built on the Internet.	For when it came down
to it, most Jihaddi (that is, members of the Jihad) had a connection
to the others in the group, whether through hanging around with them
on #tjab, the Jihad's official channel on IRC.

I would like to focus the efforts of my term paper on this online
community -- its origins, its people, and its future.  The reason I
would like to write my paper on this is simply because I feel that
one community can serve as a microcosm of how communities are forming
all over the Internet.

Some of the references I intend to use are old usenet and webboard
posts, interviews with folks involved in the group, books on online
communities in general and this one in particular (Surfing on
the Internet has a whole chapter devoted to the Jihad), and my own
personal experiences.	I do not believe that my personal experiences
will bias the paper; in fact, I believe it will make it stronger.
As fun as reports of anthropologists are,  the stories of actual
culture and community are ones that I find more interesting.