I suppose it's interesting to think about <i>how</i> Mr Wilson built his community, but more important is the sort of community he's managed to build and the question of whether it's a good or bad community. A community isn't an end in itself, and as someone recently pointed out, one of the great things about the internet is that it allows people to <i>escape</i> the communities they physically live in. (Think about the gay Midwestern kid in the wheelchair from <i>Milk</i> for a moment.)<p>If words like "good" and "bad" aren't to your liking, please substitute productive/unproductive, useful/useless, interesting/boring, liberating/stifling, or whatever arbitrary dichotomy you prefer.<p>As for the AVC community, I don't find it particularly interesting. It attracts a lot of fanboys, especially Android fans who consider anyone who buys an iPhone to be sheeple brainwashed by the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. And it attracts a lot of people who are basically promoting themselves or their businesses, and they're trying really hard to exude <i>gravitas</i>. Fuck gravitas.<p>Community is not an end in itself. A community is just as likely to embody dynamics that enforce a soul-crushing conformity as it is likely to be nurturing and supportive. All communities are mixed bags—I think that's inevitable, but don't hold me to it—and the processes that <i>create</i> a community are going to <i>shape</i> the community and the way its members interact, so I would suggest looking at AVC and asking yourself whether you want to create an AVC like community before you decide to consciously harness, deploy, or whatever those processes to create a community.<p>Oh, and the idea that you can replicate anything involving a group of people using a recipe-like approach is ridiculous. Life's complicated.