Speaking of research communities, I am pleased to announce that .LRN will be used by two research communities at MIT. Both are led by
Eric Von Hippel and
Karim Lakhani.
The first site will be called "Distributed Innovation" and centres around Eric Von Hippel's research and new book, Democratizing Innovation. Von Hippel argues that "user-innovation communities" in open source should be applied more widely, for example, in manufacturing.
The second site will be a conversion of the existing Open Source Research Project web site at MIT.