“People usually network together for personal, even instrumental reasons. They move in and out of them based on how well they serve their own work. The formation of a network is an important, preliminary gathering step.”

“Communities of practice are the next step, and they are different in significant ways. They are communities, which mean that people make a commitment to be available to each other, to offer support to share learning, to consciously develop new knowledge. They are there not only for their own needs, but for the needs of others.”

Again from the same book on pg 45 relating to communities and ecosystems.

“These communites are webs of relationships called ecosystems. Everywhere in nature, communities of diverse species live together in ways that support both the individual and the entire system. As they spin these systems into existence, new capabilities and talents emerge from the process of being together.”

From Answers.com’s definition of an ecosystem.

“An ecosystem is a complete community of living organisms and the nonliving materials of their surroundings.”

Pretty much describes the Internet / Web to me. The nonliving materials is the technology that forms this “space” and we the people are the organisms living within that space.

BTW what’s really interesting is that if you read the design principles of Permaculture by David Holmgren which relate to living in harmony within an “ecosystem”, you’ll soon realize that these principles can be translated and used as a process for building communities on the Web itself (so as to live in harmony with others within this Web ecology).

Call it hippy thinking if you want but in watching the Google Video called “Computer Networks – The Heralds of Resource Sharing”, you’ll see a lot of these principles being applied and even more so the “caring” and “sharing” ethical foundation cultivated invisibly within it. Again I think this is why the Internet and Web have such a pull on people because at the heart of their creation are simple principles and beliefs that are missing from our everyday life today (particularly in corporate business).

I can’t resist temptation to add some of my thoughts:

I think I once found a concept that describes better the infrastructural part of Internet. It was “pervasive infrastructure”. It was coined in some book about PKI and cryptography and describes such infrastructure that becomes so important and so standardized that we can build other layers of reality on top of it. See the power grid and the industry build on it.

Internet (the physical) IS our pervasive infrastructure on top of which the WEB is built. Today, on top of WEB of documents people build Semantic Web – where concepts, objects and tokens of pure knowledge could be represented (if we are successful with that next step…)

There is no question that WEB has no physical part. It IS a protocol. A software. TCP/IP – one level down – is also a protocol.

Once the protocol becomes pervasive, as it happened to TCP/IP in early nineties – the next “stratum” can be build on it.

And – last but not least – the upper stratums are irreducible to the lower ones.

I think, I hope – the trend will continue and has no limits…

Now – about the tendency to reify reality. I nod my head too :-)

This tendency is not only among us. I was once amazed when discovered how deep is the tendency of reification among neurologist and neurobiologist.
They seem to reduce our mind to our brain and its “hardware”. They were quite successful with such approach for many years – but the true understanding of the mind is still elusive – to say the least. It seems – they do not yet even think of “the software” that runs on our brains. And as this software (or protocol) is certainly of different type that “Turing machine” – we are far from understanding even pieces of it….