To keep up the theme of reblogging ancient posts (at least in blog time), here’s a fantastic summary, complete with academic references, of what it takes to build a virtual community. It’s framed in the context of a business that wants to develop online relationships with communities of customers, but it’s particularly relvent in the context of the Mycroft Project, which I previously blogged about.

Mycroft is off to an amazing start, and thus far we’ve been quietly rolling out a variety of mostly sucky content. However, a real prototype is almost ready, and we are working on our web presence. It’s okay for now, since we get next to no traffic. But anyway, as I hope will be clear from the description that Mycroft’s success and failure depends to a huge degree on how well we can create a distributed community of contributors.