Peter Bond illustrates some important underlying principles of communities of practice. Bond's graph mapping a community's degree of formalism with its 'emotional energy' looks almost exactly like a graph drawn by Francisco Varela at a session I attended in 1994 or so. Varela, though, mapped link density against information transmission. His sweet spot - enough information to create semantically relevance, but not so much as to create chaos - maps almost exactly against Bond's sweet spot for communities of practice. I don't think this correlation is accidental; I think they were mapping the same thing. Take the two concepts together and you arrive what the ideal degree of connectivity between entities in order to create a maximal online community. And that point is the modified scale free network I tried to desribe in Community Blogging, and I continue to believe (though I can't prove it) that the mathematics expressing this sweet spot may be found in the study of Boltzmann machines. With Bond, I recommend the study of what he calls "an extraordinary theoretical base, primarily derived from a biological perspective of human behaviour and cognition, and how it might be used to better understand the concept of communities of practice." Via Nancy White.
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