Stephen O'Grady is thinking about the benefits of community in domains other than software:

Anyway, maybe it's just because the benefits of community are so obvious in the world of software, but it seems like a no-brainer to me that other industries would benefit from a bit of community building themselves.

I've already written a little bit about the Creating Passionate Users tutorial at OSCON, but there were a few phrases and ideas that smacked me in the side of the head, and left my head ringing like a bell. One of them was this: "Where this is passion, there is community". It seems so obvious, but when I heard it, it was still like a smack in the head. I wish I could point to a post on Kathy's blog about this, but I couldn't dig one up, and I can't make a permalink to my copy of the tutorial notes. Stephen's post began with musing on a post by Caterina Fake of Flickr, which is a result of this phenomenon. Flickr is not about software, it's about photography and the worldwide community that are photography nuts. And most products that people are passionate about have large communities. Think Harley Davidson, think car clubs -- you could probably think of many more. If people get passionate about something, the question isn't will there be a community, the question is where will the community meet and form, and what will be the culture of that community...