Islanders all come to yack on Nantucket's online forum

At Nantucket's Town Meeting last month , Selectman Michael Kopko kept one eye on the crowd in the high school gymnasium and the other on the town forum's online chat room.

In the run-up to the annual rite of government, Town Meeting had come alive at YackOn.com, where members debated the Nantucket Sewer Act and the plight of a family threatened with losing its land to eminent domain. Through the interminable proceedings, Kopko monitored the snide chat room banter and answered questions that popped up on the screen. One attendee posted photos: "Put them on your desktop and feel like you're there!"

The mainstream Internet has been primarily a one-way medium. People all over the world log on to do research, find news, or shop. But ordinary people have become powerful influencers and creators as the Web has evolved into a more interactive, user-generated world filled with homemade videos and blogs, online social networks, and social news and bookmarking sites where popular opinion can catapult the lowliest blog posting into the spotlight.

The symbiosis between the online world and national affairs has been underscored by the political de bates that have raged over material posted on YouTube.com and MySpace.com and by candidates adding the sites to their standard list of media outlets. But the civic transformation is playing out at the local level, too.

The effect is especially noticeable on the island of Nantucket, where the virtual community has helped shepherd lost pets back to their homes and compelled civic leaders to weigh in or answer questions. When Cindy Houghton started a thread seeking information about a plane crash on the island in 1958, she received an outpouring of stories, and a piece of the plane even showed up in her mailbox. YackOn has even become party to official town business -- when the Board of Selectmen recently voted to put a link to the forum on the town's website.

"When people first came online, they were going to the world. Now, people are starting to come 'home' online, starting to find places where the town hall exists in a virtual sense," said Steven Clift , chairman of the board of E-Democracy.org, which creates online issues forums for communities. "It allows real space and cyberspace to be one, and have an interchange betwee n the two."

The towns most likely to have thriving, active mailing lists and forums are the ones that already have a strong sense of community and identity, Clift said. In Massachusetts, towns such as Framingham, Arlington, and Marshfield have thriving e-mail lists or forums.

"I created this because I needed a big fat flashlight" to shine on town hall, said Steven Orr , who runs Frambors (frambors.syslang.net) , a Framingham town government e-mail list with more than 1,000 subscribers that he says boasts members from the town manager to the Conservation Commission.

The Marshfield forum can be a bit wild, Selectman Michael Maresco said, but it does create a new and different sense of community.

"I think that with everyone's lifestyles, people in the workforce today are at the computer terminal -- for them it's a click away, a couple keystrokes and they can get in, voice their opinion, ask a question and feel they are really participating in a particular community," he said.

Nantucket's forum -- affectionately or dismissively referred to as "Yack" -- has grown from a Yahoo group into a vibrant online bulletin board that attracts about 2,000 unique visitors each day, while the year-round population on the island hovers at around 10,000 people at last census count.

The forum's detractors argue that only a handful of people are actively involved in posting and creating content, and Kopko says the site, which allows people to post anonymously, is often dismissed as a "cesspool of disinformation."

Still, it reaches an audience of influential lurkers. On a recent afternoon, a role call of the 114 people online read like a who's who on the island: a selectman, a conservation foundation employee, a surveyor, an innkeeper, a former teacher, a computer technician from the hospital, a pilot, a reporter from the local newspaper, and the head of a local non profit were all logged in, according to Grant Sanders, who created the forum.

And when something creates a stir on the forum, it isn't uncommon for chatter to rattle out of the online world and into the real world.

Last July, when war protester Cindy Sheehan visited the town, someone suggested on the forum that the Nantucket Police were videotaping the crowd to get money from Homeland Security . By the next day, Sanders said he received a call from Police Chief William Pittman telling him it wasn't true.

"I will say this, a lot of people in the town building -- people involved with what goes on here, selectmen, they look at it," said David Goodman , a ceramic tile installer who also writes a column for the Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror newspaper.

Catherine Flanagan Stover posts in her official capacity as town clerk, as well as herself, signing it QC for "Queen Catherine."

"Before this, the only information was on the two local TV channels and the two local newspapers or just talking to your neighbor or someone at work," she said. "This gives you access to all walks of life -- access to people on-island, off-island, people who have just reams of talent and information and knowledge, and they're accessible to everyone."

But some dismiss the website as an unruly territory for anonymous users to publicly attack neighbors or enemies without accountability.

Patricia Roggeveen , who was elected to the Board of Selectmen without being involved with the forum, refuses to read or post on the forum.

"I don't believe it's something that is benign at all," she said. "It's just like whispering across the backyard fence, but it resonates out over the Internet."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.