Web 2.0 and the proliferation of communities

Reply to a message from Don Osborn on the Web2forDev DGroup raising the issue of reduced participation in Web 2.0 tools due to registration/login screen.

I think the point raised by Don Osborn is a real issue when it comes to participation in Web 2.0 tools.

This is part of a more general aspect of Web 2.0: the proliferation of communities.

With Web 2.0, services are typically built for / by a community. Communities very often overlap but remain separate and this sometimes discourages participation in new communities and makes participation in similar but separate communities a repetitive and fatiguing task.

I think something that should be looked into are existing efforts towards “universal user accounts”, or more technically “decentralized single sign-on systems”, like the Open ID initiative. At least in the agricultural / development community, ways should be explored to access different communities with as few as possible accounts, hopefully one.

And something can be done to make participation in several similar/related communities easier, like providing cross-posting tools and some forms of cross-display (like displaying RSS from related forums/wikis).

This is something that is already happening in some communities but not in all.

It would be interesting to hear of successful experiences in this.