great video. My two have grown up and left home, but it brought back memories.

As for online community story. I think you know that I designed and built the CoP platform for UK local government at http://www.communities.idea.gov.uk. It went live in Sept 2006 and now has over 9000 registered users, with 200 new users registering each week. When I look back at how this all began, I’m amazed it happened at all. The label “Web 2.0″ wasn’t around when I did the spec in 2005. I felt at the time I was cobbling things together that I was fairly comfortable with (blogs, wikis etc.), but wasn’t sure if a fairly conservative demographic working in local gov would ever use. The key was to make them easy to use, so I stripped out all the bells and whistles from each of the apps (who needs trackback anyway!) and spent most of the cash on the user interface, with simple one-click integration between the apps.

I thought we’d be doing well to have a few hundred users, but it’s now taken on a life of its own, with 290 different CoPs active (and I don’t know what all of them are doing!) and more starting each week. Many of the users have been there for over 12 months, and I’m now seeing demand for all the wizzy things that I initially stripped out (e.g. social bookmarking), so I’m now trying to keep up with a maturing user-base that are becoming rapidly more familiar with the tools. The difficult bit is implementing more complex features without intimidating those that are fairly new to the platform. A difficult dynamic to get right.

I would add that I read Etienne’s book ‘Cultivating Communities of Practice’, which was great in terms of the psychology of CoPs, but I had to rely very much on my own experience and intuition in order to meld the technology with the people. One day I’ll write my own book about it!

Good luck at the conference.

Steve Dale