Matt Jones sends word of an academic paper detailing the organizational mutations which occurred during last October's HipTop Nation Scavenger Hunt (PDF: 5p). John Lester (Harvard Med) details how Team Raven evolved quickly from a smart mob to an organized community of practice because, as community bloggers, they were already well versed in the critical elements these communities need: They knew who did what and who they could rely upon (ie trust), they had a network of weak ties between individuals and they had a strong shared sense of place. All they needed to coallesce into a community of practice was the challenge of the hunt.

While maybe not a proof, John's paper does agree with my own casual observations of the use of community portals in the opensource software communities; with a few curious exceptions (such as Linux) all of the largest and most complex free-software projects are now managed off community-portal websites such as SourceForge or on project owned instances of PHP-Nuke or Drupal. The value of a community portal is in building the infrastructure networks crucial to effective online collaboration.

And of course the community plumbing (as Drupal calls it) is just that, it's just infrastructure. By itself, Ryze or Ecademy is just a cocktail party, random bits bouncing between participants, and it doesn't look like much to an outsider. John's observations show that what you're looking at is the ground over the water, the surface of an untapped resource: Effective communities of practice emerge out from this infrastructure -- but you must also have a task, and it's the lack of common tasks that keeps most of these portal sites wandering aimlessly through their weak associations. For community and professional organizations, however, as with the free-software teams, there is a common bond of an objective, so this last ingredient of the catalyst task is not really a problem.