The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is worth reading. It shows how the power of an online developer community was harnessed to develop one of the world's most successful, open source, products: Linux. It also includes a case study that copies this approach to develop another open source product.
The article includes many useful points that could be applied to many online communities, including e-learning and social networking / learning.
Here's some key extracts:-
One point that comes out of this is that lots of users can work wonders and, at times, exceed your expectations. So perhaps the moral for e-learning might be to have a large social networking system that allows users across courses to interact with each other.
"keeping ... users constantly stimulated and rewarded - stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work."
"The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better." - This also matches up with the above point about recognition and reward.
"Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong."
"When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential codevelopers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future."
"To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people."
"where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere."
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