Her talk at eTech about building digital communities is proof. Here's the mind-blowing killer quote:

1) Empower users. Give them the ability to personalize and culturalize their spaces online. Let people create the contexts in which their expressions can occur so that they can help set and regulate the norms. This means everything from hackable HTML to open APIs to open source code that can spiral everywhere.

2) Provide the cultural environment where people can accidentally connect with strangers over meaningful things without being forced to face everyone on the system. Let users privatize or wall off access to only certain people for their own needs. Let users see the valuees of being public. Of course, balancing privacy needs with public possibilities with the lack of interest in dealing with the *whole* public is quite tricky. Anyone who can solve this design challenge with a robust system will win the hearts of users and investors.

3) Empower individual users to be cultural spokespeople. Give them the ability to modify the system for their communities and cultural needs. Again, this means openness of software or providing richer platforms to develop on top of.

Organic community growth, embedded design, and the ability to connect culturally local communities through global network are the way to form large sustainable communities. My hope is that there are new fascinating communities emerging as we speak!

That is some straight up truth, no doubt.

It is, in my opinion, kinda sorta related to two ideas that Internet marketers are probably familiar with: Seth Godin's money paradox (the sooner you ask for money, the less you get) and the open source revolution (open source = good, because the value is in the community and relationships around the product, not the product itself). Develop culture and focus on creating a platform that allows people to build meaningful and valuable relationships. I'm convinced that if you're patient and focus on doing that, the money will follow.

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