And here it’s laid out in such wonderful terms that I couldn’t say it better myself.

What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? Like being the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and tedium…

It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.

This is what’s going on in our lives right now. We all are trying to figure out the best path. We are dealing with old media vs. new media, people wanting us to build an online community in our spare time. This, however, is what we are attempting to do.

And, as we move further into the project, we realize the task at hand is daunting. But it can be done.

Because we believe it is the right thing to do.