What I find interesting is to consider how these issues change as the community is intentionally constrained by geography. While they appear to be communities of specific interest – geography shapes interest at the broadest levels even when layered with some shared experience. Cultural diversity also exists – though is moderated by a level of common experience.

Will members of these communities behave like Stanley Milgram’s “familiar strangers” where the online world and is the new environment that breaks the barriers? Can that process be helped, and if it can would users want it?

It seems to me that as the number of people familiar with online communities increases the necessity to cater to the world to reach critical decreases – and the opportunity for the online to enhance ones experience of place increases.

I wanted to suggest something about “embedded observation”: it’s hard for it to stay about observation as much as it can become about being embedded. Maybe this is a feature of the “scale” problem you desribe, e.g., it’s a scale of time rather than size.

IMHO, it can be advantageous to both have embedded observers take a break, and/or to introduce “outside” observers into the mix with those embedded. (And, by outside, I mean more like freshly embedded rather than long-term embedded.)

Both of these arrangements can be horrible if the dynamics are wrong or the goals are abstract business-based rather than visceral community-based, but, in general principle, it can create a greater diversity of vantage points from which to see and appreciate what’s going on.