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How Bioware Makes A Community Work
Gamasutra has an article discussing the procedures that Bioware uses to maintain and grow their online communities based around their games. From the article: "Fans as content creators are another asset. 'if you build it, they will build it as well...' Some members want to add to the community in very real and meaningful ways, and some of them possess 'mad skillz.' '90% of what sustains a community,' Watamaniuk stated, 'is the community itself. You provide the framework for their work. If fans are there creating content, it means that you don't have to create 100% of the content yourself.'"
I've talked with Jay before and he's a very nice guy. I suspect many of the lessons he's learned here were painful ones.
It's also interesting what wasn't talked about. I think Bioware has had some very painful interactions with some of the license holders of various intellectual properties (e.g. D&D and Star Wars). Often times, they're stuck being intermediaries between those groups and the community. I suspect the place isn't always a happy one.
From a builder's perspective (I make NWN mods), I very much appreciate developer's comments on the forums as well as releasing good information and tools to aid my tasks. We're essentially unpaid volunteers that increase the value of their product. I think it's important that developers treat these small groups of rabid mod makers quite well. Folks like Valve and Epic and Bioware have generally done a pretty good job with this, one of the reasons people still play Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Neverwinter Nights.