Jonathan Hedstrom, OpenSourcery

Any community, online or otherwise, is about communication between individuals. As such, when it comes time to create or grow an online community, tools that allow for and encourage communication and interaction are vital.

There are two major hurdles that must be overcome for an online community to succeed: the selection of appropriate community (or "social-networking") features that make sense for the community in question, and, secondly, actually implementing those features in your online application. The first is often overlooked in favor of the more exciting second step. When this happens, the community rarely benefits from the resulting application.

Every community has unique needs that determine how they should select features. Once a community has determined its needs, however, utilizing open source software presents a more rapid, sustainable path to implementation.