There are other reasons why all is not idyllic in the world of DC Urban Moms. As with any online community that gathers a critical mass of users, there have been growing pains such as spammers and commercial enterprises that see the list's members as prospective customers. Steele and Sokurashvili have set up content filters to block some advertising-type messages; they manually reject others. (You can ask for a recommendation of a yoga class, housekeeper and so on, but you can't advertise such services.) Steele said this battle is tough, because some commercial information is useful. But he doesn't want the list to be taken over by ads.
Like all Internet ventures, DC Urban Moms has to deal with the privacy issue.
Sheryl Stein of Arlington connects to DC Urban Moms, an online parenting support group, while her children Kira Sweetman, 6, left, and 23-month-old Julian Sweetman, play nearby.
(Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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After one woman claimed a weekly newspaper had quoted her directly from the list without permission, Steele and Sokurashvili added a line at the bottom of every posting that says a message may not be republished without the writer's knowledge.
Steele and Sokurashvili said another woman reported being "fired" by her pediatrician after she posted a critical comment about the doctor's practice on the list. Steele said several people have asked him to erase their identifying e-mail addresses in the archives, which he has done.
The moderators say a growing number of members are dropping subscriptions to which their names are attached and then re-subscribing under assumed names. Longtime members of DC Urban Moms hope the new anonymity won't dull the sense of community, the feeling of chatting over cups of coffee rather than over a high-speed Internet line.
Stein said the group has been so vital to her that when her husband, son and daughter were simultaneously throwing up recently, her immediate impulse was to go online and ask a fellow DC Urban Mom to come over and help. That probably wasn't going to work, but it did give her a laugh at a tough moment.
Divide and Grow
Fathers, who have been mostly silent observers from the start, recently weighed in to DC Moms, saying they wanted to be part of the conversation. Sokurashvili and Steele, a stay-at-home dad for more than a year, welcomed them to the fray.
As the group has grown, it has spun off a slew of sub-communities: working moms, part-time working moms, moms working at home, over-40 new moms, moms trying to wean babies, German-speaking moms and newly divorced moms. This has encouraged bonding and helped reduce some friction.
Meagan Jeronimo, a legal secretary and mother of a 20-month-old, launched the separate DC Working Moms group in 2004 after the DC Urban Moms list became too unwieldy for her.
She was also annoyed at what she felt was a stay-at-home slant to the list, saying that many of the moms had set up play groups through the list that met during working hours. "I'm lost here," she remembers thinking about managing work and motherhood. "I want to talk to someone who's going through this."
DC Working Moms now has more than 500 members and meets in different places around the city for mid-week lunches without the kids. The site also has a database for women who have their own businesses, and the members have begun doing some grassroots lobbying -- promoting, for example, increased public support for child care.
Really Now
For Steele and Sokurashvili, who have day jobs in the technology industry, DC Urban Moms is what the Internet used to be before commercial interests took over. Though many people have sold or bought things through the group, the couple has not made any money.
"Appreciation is enough," deadpans Steele. It's true, he said, that their server gets so overloaded they may need to buy a faster computer soon. They've debated putting a voluntary contribution option on the site, as many Web logs have.
But for now, the couple is enjoying what has become a Washington family channel, a reality show of sorts, and learning from the postings. The couple tries to let the members steer the conversation and fight their own battles whenever possible. "We are in the background," said Sokurashvili.
Steele, who said he is not the kind of father who would ever have picked up a parenting book, said what he's learned from the list makes it worth the work. He uses the archives as a "mini-Google" to find information about charter schools, birthday party activities and family friendly restaurants.
And, of course, DC Urban Moms provides the couple with another key benefit: entertainment. "It's what we talk about in the evening," said Sokurashvili.•
Shannon Henry has covered technology in Washington for the past 10 years, most recently for The Washington Post's Business section. She is working on a book about motherhood.
