Community Culture

There's a Bedouin proverb which goes like this:

Me against my brother
Me and my brother against my cousin
Me, my brother and my cousin against the foreigner

In the past two years there's been a rash of websites which have sprung up to cater for the formation of communities and, looking at them, you really have to wonder whether we have improved the ability to foster a rich community experience. 

Communities which prosper over the next 12 months will be communities who are able to create a mentoring atmosphere and gain retention by helping struggling users to learn better ways of doing things or, to provide some sort of validation as to where they fit within the wider community pool.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against "Top N X" lists; I'm just concerned that we are producing boilerpate community sites from a template which may not be a great model.