Some History

Josh Neff sent out a tweet on April 27th, 2007 declaring that the Library Society of the World was a thing, that it would never charge any dues, and that anyone who said they were a member would be a member. He and Steve Lawson got things rolling and since then, we've ebbed and flowed across many social networking platforms.

Platforms and Groups

Here are the places we've inhabited in roughly chronological order.

• Twitter (mostly in the early years, before FriendFeed)
• Our original (now dead) Wiki
  • Original membership roster
  • Original policies
• Meebo (a free synchronous chat room we used to hang out in until it shut down in 2012)
• TheLSW.org (a now-dead version of our website, live until about 2015 or 2016? Something like that.)
• FriendFeed (a social networking platform since bought and shut down by Facebook, when Facebook wanted to begin offering comments and likes. We lingered there as long as FB would let us, until they finally kicked us out in 2015.)
• Facebook Public Group (mostly for general announcements and findability rather than conversation, since so many members are leery of FB's privacy issues)
• Facebook Private Group (for those rare times when people want to post to FB about LSW topics but don't want people outside of the group to see - it's a sub-set of the main public group - rarely used)
• Facebook Page (yes, lack of bureaucracy means that sometimes you have both a group AND a page, and they aren't owned by the same people, but they're all still us! It's all good!)
• Slack (one of the things we experimented with when FriendFeed shut down - no longer active but still available if needed)
• Mokum! (Our current primary gathering place since 2016)

Physical Gatherings

• Remember CiL2008 LobbyCon???

Awards and Things members have published

• Josh Neff and Steve Lawson named Movers & Shakers in 2010 for launching the LSW
• We maintain a Zotero Group of things members have published.