Community building is a difficult thing to do. I've been involved in two developing communities over the past months. SAKAI and Open Solaris and they are both fascinating. I have managed many large scale development projects with huge numbers of developers both on site and in distributed environments. I am a big supporter of community development and have used it for many years on my development projects. Having been involved in these high profile projects and a few on Java.Net have helped me refine the development process I'll use on my next project.
I believe there is a place for open source, community source and bespoke purpose-built software where they seek to solve different problems. More thoughts on this later.
I have been blown away by the success of Open Solaris. In only 2 days there is a massive community and growing very quickly. The guys have done a great job in putting the right tools in place to support virtual collaboration.
The coolest thing about the Open Solaris community is the Sun Studio 10 compiler to build the OS. It rocks and is blazing fast.
I can't wait to see how this evolves...build your own OS and then build your own eLearning apps....now that's choice.
I'm off on a much needed vacation now but when I come back I'll be setting up SAKAI and Moodle on Open Solaris.
Stay tuned for build instructions appearing on www.sun.com/edu