I agree, at this time I believe there is way to much talk in general about the technology or platform facilitating community. Over the last four years I have worked on the building of a number of communities (learning and otherwise) and every time the platform discussion comes up. I have come to the conclusion that the "Internet is the platform", tying a community (other that tagging) to any particular platform misses the point of community. IMHO community is about honoring everyone and their approaches, and once you decide on a specific platform (drupal, webct, WPMu, Moodle, ning, yahoo groups, wiki, blackboard, etc... many technologies here) you restrain the community from expressing itself. And how many times have I seen a key community member creating some other useful community node in a new or different technology. I used to get frustrated by this, you know, why didn't they just use the agreed upon platform! Well the platform obviously didn't meet their needs and they went a built somethig new, very relevant and useful somewhere else... So, once we decide the "Internet is the platform" then we will stop talking platform and we can get on with how to facilitate communities using the internet and its woderful set of integrated technologies.... sorry for the rant, but I think I made my point.
So this now goes back to the use of tagging. The use of tagging or the creation of a folkonomy within the community will tie it all together. We have done this with some success with our open gov't initiative on Bowen Island.
With the use of tagging we can get complete coverage of the community without being tied to any particular platform. Ahhh... the semantic web really is the 3.0...
Thanks for letting me lurk on this discussion. You chose a topic I am passionate about so I just had to speak up. I am also co-authoring a book chapter on this topic, funnily enough it is a very technical chapter...
Collaborative Book: Internet is the platform.
Thanks for your time,
Peter