On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:10 AM, Kerry Raymond <k.raymond(a)qut.edu.au> wrote: +1 I'm sure everyone can talk about conference "success stories" as well as tales of terrible time-wasters. One success story for me: I met someone who turned out to be a future collaborator at Wikimania in Gdansk. My experiences at the co-located WikiSym did not seem to have the same staying power. The thing is, it would be rather hard to know this in advance. My "academic" contribution to WikiSym is what opened the door to me traveling there in the first place. Also, the only reason he and I ended up collaborating was because we later met online, again by chance, and already knew about one another's work and motivations. The moral, I think, is to look for principles that increase the chances of serendipity. Things like OpenSpace try to do that, but I think are less powerful than "the real thing". It seems to me that the same sort of thoughts (and criteria) should apply to building (and assessing) research / discourse communities online. YES there are many times when I've met collaborators first online. But I nearly always go to visit the strongest collaborators in person at some point!