AXQ: I have been informed by a logistics specialist that the organization being described here is now known more generally as a "community of practice", or CoP. Such online communities typically only admit members with certain professional credentials, and discuss trade practices and common experiences among their members. What this specialist said was different about CC from most of the CoP he participated in was that, in the latter cases, the authentication mechanism was a gatekeeper only. So in many CoP forum situations, you have to produce credentials to register, but then you can post pseudonymously. This reduces the normative accountability of the forum while still assuring professional participation (thus lowering the probability of an IBEX incident). This reenforces the point made in the comments for Ch4Pt1, as it provides an authorization of attributes that then no longer tracks those attributes to a known RL identity.

Syndicom:  Syndcom Inc. has been working for the past five years to create a CoP? for spine surgeons called "SpineConnect"  (www.spineconnect.com) which sounds very similar in its mission and strategy to Counsel Connect.   We have worked with three business professors (Raymond Miles, Chuck Snow and Grant Miles) whose mission it has been to understand new forms of organization over the past forty years; this has recently culminated in the publication of a book titled "Collaborative Entrepreneurship" (http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=4801).   Syndicom has learned a great deal about facilitaiing the creation of a community based on trust.   Like Counsel Connect, everyone users their real names, members for "groups" and the discussion centers around their professional needs - initially interesting or difficult surgical cases involving the spine.   Syndicom has used the Creative Commons license for these discussions in the hopes that as the discussions evolve and the commmunity matures, these may be syndicated to journals for the dissemination of knowledge being created within the community.  

Would love to provide more detailed descriptions of our successes and failures for this book.