MentorNet: lessons learned from electronic communities for women engineers

Electronic communications are providing unprecedented opportunities for the development of communities among people at diverse locations and with similar interests. This paper examines electronic communities sponsored by MentorNet (the National Electronic Industrial Mentoring Network for Women in Engineering and Science), which sponsors electronic discussion lists to foster the development of communities among female engineering and science students with male and female professional engineers and scientists. In this paper, we identify electronic discussion lists that evolved into electronic communities and investigate what distinguishes these communities. The lists that organically evolved into electronic communities maintained three to four simultaneous discussions, included diverse perspectives within a focused general topic, and had new topics raised periodically, either explicitly, in the form of a question, or implicitly, as part of a larger description or story. The professionals who participated in the electronic communities kept the list active by periodically seeding the list with discussion topics