I suppose it's interesting to think about how Mr Wilson built his community, but more important is the sort of community he's managed to build and the question

I suppose it's interesting to think about how Mr Wilson built his community, but more important is the sort of community he's managed to build and the question of whether it's a good or bad community. A community isn't an end in itself, and as someone recently pointed out, one of the great things about the internet is that it allows people to escape the communities they physically live in. (Think about the gay Midwestern kid in the wheelchair from Milk for a moment.) If words like "good" and "bad" aren't to your liking, please substitute productive/unproductive, useful/useless, interesting/boring, liberating/stifling, or whatever arbitrary dichotomy you prefer. As for the AVC community, I don't find it particularly interesting. It attracts a lot of fanboys, especially Android fans who consider anyone who buys an iPhone to be sheeple brainwashed by the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. And it attracts a lot of people who are basically promoting themselves or their businesses, and they're trying really hard to exude gravitas. Fuck gravitas. Community is not an end in itself. A community is just as likely to embody dynamics that enforce a soul-crushing conformity as it is likely to be nurturing and supportive. All communities are mixed bags—I think that's inevitable, but don't hold me to it—and the processes that create a community are going to shape the community and the way its members interact, so I would suggest looking at AVC and asking yourself whether you want to create an AVC like community before you decide to consciously harness, deploy, or whatever those processes to create a community. Oh, and the idea that you can replicate anything involving a group of people using a recipe-like approach is ridiculous. Life's complicated.