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Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, notes, “Our most successful Hosts only had 10 members in their communities after 30 days.” We can think of a couple of reasons why that might be true.

A learning community is like a mutual improvement society, much as an online course is like a self-help book. Both can be useful. Learning communities are best for sharing experiences and developing wisdom or mastery.

When confronted with a prediction, we tend to react by thinking “true or false.” A more productive response to a well-considered prediction would be to ask, “Under what conditions is the prediction likely to be true?”

Too often, business meetings suck. They don’t have to. Meeting hosts can help build trust in the process by being mindful of Purpose, People, and Process. Meeting participants, in turn, have a responsibility to be Prepared, Prompt, and Present. Effective—even energizing—meetings are the result.

Proximity or propinquity may be necessary to instill a sense of community, but they aren’t sufficient. Communities are purposeful. That may be particularly true of successful online communities.

Effective meetings have a clear purpose. Agendas and patterns of conversation that send mixed messages—however inadvertently—are likely to undermine the achievement of that purpose.

Research supports the contention that success is a product of failing better and faster than your competition. Persistence is necessary but insufficient. You must learn efficiently from failure and act quickly on what you learn.

A learning community host must be a recognized member of the community, must have deep, practical experience, and must be able to articulate a coherent theoretical framework.

A facilitation process or collaboration tool used in a meeting have value in context, and the context is determined by the purpose of, and people in, each individual meeting.

Technology mediation requires the timely execution of many tasks. If you aren’t careful, you can be overwhelmed by the administrative demands of community management. Automate what should be automated in order to free your time to focus on high-value human interaction.