On NPR this morning, it was said that the internet has been claimed and the only growth industry is in on-line community and conferencing. None of us has an answer, though I believe parts of the equation are becoming clearer. I imagine that for-profit organizations will turn out to be our pioneers in community development because they realize that their existing organizational stucture has already changed. The pyramids are gone. And communities have arrived.
Conversations are the stuff and glue of communities.
They are core business processes that are increasingly important as global marketplaces expand and organizations become more geographically scattered. It's impossibly expensive for a global corporation to fly everyone around the world all the time in order to have all the conversations they need to have. Conversational events on the Web will become the norm. This is a program that we host on The Meta Network for Western Michigan University. It's a collaborative program involving the university, high schools, and local business, arts and technology groups in western Michigan.