Our very good friend David Cushman of Bauer (who bought up his employer Emap) is a prolific blogger in the digitally converging media space at Faster Future, one of our fave blogsites to read regularly. He wrote a White Paper recently about the role of digital communities to corporate enterprises, not as customers, but as forms of organizational structure. The theme is rather obvious from the title of the document "Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21st Century". Its very good, and available for free of course. Here is a bit of a sampler. David writes:

"Example after example is showing the world is moving toward it – we want to join in the production process, we want to customise, we want to shape and select. The creation generation insists on it. In this world our global focus group can now disintermediate the companies they were once feeding back to. Now they can become the producer, their own board of directors. Now consider how companies function. If they could connect their own dots perhaps they’d start the process of catching up with the reorganisation of the disaggregated skill sets that is already happening on a global scale through blogs and social networks.

Timescale: Short to mid-term requirement for change in companies, mid-longterm change in how we will organise ourselves."

Very good stuff as always from David. You can read the full White Paper here (or download it) at Scribd.

Original Source: Communities Dominate Brands