Building critical mass

I have been busy with my doctoral dissertation; however, I feel that I have been neglecting this community a bit. In fact, Portulano is an essential piece of the dissertation, but a difficult one to write about at this point. For there's not much I can say yet.

The community is still more of a concept than a reality. The truth is that there's no member activity. The literature is ripe with suggestions, advice, admonitions about what makes community and what not; how communities are formed, stormed, normed, and so on and so forth. Here are two quotes that really sober me up, on the one hand, and give me hope, on the other. Maybe it is still too soon to tell whether Portulano is perceived as a valuable project for its members?

For an initial pilot, practitioners and researchers can be invited to participate. To be effective in the long term, the collaborative environment needs to achieve critical mass - we need a lot of contributors generating valuable material that attracts a lot of readers, and in turn makes it worthwhile for contributors to participate. (ThinkCycle)

One third of the groups represented in this study had a membership of more than 500 persons. This fact is important because discussion groups need a critical mass of members who post in order to sustain activity, as the majority of any public online group are listeners or lurkers given that posting is voluntary... (Mauri Collins, PhD Dissertation)