The community of practice definitions are very helpful. In the follow up post I”ve written I borrowed the wikipedia definition, in part because it’s a general reference, but I like these definitions.

I also like blizzard’s comment that communities are groups of people that depend on each other.

I’m most of the way through Clay Shirky’s _Here Comes Everybody_ which is all about collaborative communities, and may help frame your thinking, if you’re interested in someone else attempting to do that.

In the part I’m at now, he’s talking about the three characteristics of successful communities:

– The promise. The reason people are drawn to the community, and interested in becoming members.
– The tools. What it is about the community that enables its members to communicate, collaborate, and produce; how it works around the organizational and oversight requirements that used to require a corporate structure.
– The bargain. What community members expect of each other and will have expected of them.

His prose is a bit repetitive at times, as he tries to drive his messages home, but he got me with one quote on a randomly leafed-to page (paraphrased):

“It used to be that we did big things for money and small things for love. Even a barn raising is a reasonably small thing, and a community that takes care of each other can do that without a profit motive. But the costs of building an encyclopedia are too big to do for love, money must be involved to overcome the friction. Now, though, we have unprecedented abilities to collaborate in a distributed way with less friction. We can do big things for love.”