A community needs an identifiable hero and inspiration from within the company.

Many employees would like to build a community, but one person needs to prioritise this task. Therefore, hire a person to be a community champion.

Discourse or verbal exchange should be encouraged. Any company that fosters community building should participate in exchanging ideas and opinions.

Your website should provide a community forum where customers and employees can engage with one another. This will help you to...

Your product should be "customisable," "extensible," and "malleable." Consider Adobe Photoshop. Without the company's plug-in architecture, a community might not have developed quickly.

But giving them something to chew on means your engineers did not create the perfect product. This will e...

If you create a great product, communities will inevitably form, with or without your help.

However, building a community around a mediocre product will be very difficult.

There are two requirements of an open system.

1. The Software Development Kit (SDK) is documentation and tools to supplement and tweak a product.
2. The Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is information on how to access the various functions o...