Roger Benningfiled discusses what he thinks is incorrect of Scoble's take on decntralzing communities. Both raise interesting points, but one of the comments that Roger makes hits home to me:

It simply means that a community needs a sense of place, common experience, and leadership. Three things that you lose the further you get from a central, defining locus of activity.

A community is often difficult to really join. It has rules that can be enforced, and occasionally cheated. It means something to its denizens... they're invested in it, via cash, sweat or time. It isn't entirely self-organizing, because it requires some form of leadership to give it direction. It feels like a territory worth defending, if necessary.

Does this sound familiar to anyone else? It does to me and it's FidoNet. Heck, you can even look at Rime, too.

You remember BBS communities. If you were a sysop of a BBS you could offer your users the experience of interacting with others around the country. Most used a hub and spoke message distribution system, but FidoNet didn't. FidoNet used a pass on message distribution.

Instead of all systems calling into one single point, FidoNet systems passed messages along to each other up and downstream. It worked great.

The keys to the success of the message networks in the 80s were the following:

1) Sweat equity. Both Scoble and Roger touch on this. To get into FidoNet you had to prove that you could configure your system and connect to the network. This is still the case today. This is an important consideration as you know that the folks who are building your community understand the rules and what it takes to be a member.

2) Rules. Message networks were moderated. You stayed on topic and the moderator ensured flame wars didn't break out. We've swung back to the opposite extreme where there are very few rules on mailing lists, comment sections, forums, etc.

3) Documentation. When message systems were started a plan was laid out detailing what each of the forums would do. When I started a messaging system, whose name I forget, we mapped out that there would be a for sale section, modem support, etc. Where does this exist in the Blogsphere right now? We don't even have a standard for passing category information among systems.

The impetus for Scoble's discussion started due to the Longhorn Blog site being down. What's developed is a conversation about the metaphor used to define online communities in the blogsphere. This is an important discussion, because one day someone will invent a process to draw order from the chaos that exists now.

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