In reply to Harold.

"90% of communities fail"Actually, I'm the person Jay was quoting, and as with many quotes, it was accurate (not metaphorical), but not complete. We build internal communities for organizations - and in fact in our experience 90% of them fail. The point I was making in my presentation was that most of them fail for lack of planning, sponsorship, or energy by their sponsor. There is often a "deploy the technology and they will come" or a "deploy the technology and magically people will communicate/collaborate where they never did before" attitude - and I then offered some specific guidelines for how to make such communities successful. I think that the emergence of blogs and wikis are extremely interesting phenomena which will in many ways transform our notions of online community - not all for the better; and that much of what's written about these communities is (a) overly rosey, and (b) better suited for public than internal organizational online collaboration (the area in which I focus). The "hyde park" style of community, IMHO, is best suited for an echosphere experience where we get the "buzz" and hear the news and opinions of the day - with some interplay and comment. It is less well suited for sustained conversation, deep dialog, and the emergence of trust, relationship, norms, and other things that have traditional been the "glue" that hold communities together. (As an example, I prolly won't ever get back here to respond to any comments that others might have to this posting...) Bill Bruck Software for online collaboration www.Q2Learning.com http://Q2learning.blogs.com