Shai Agassi on Community Value

Shai Agassi held a private Q&A after his keynote.  Of interest to me was his comments on their largest online community, the Software Developer Network:

500,000 visitors per month.  Aggregation of knowledge that is second to none.  slashdot for SAP.  SIs in India are hiring them 500 people at a time and saying for their first three months they are supposed to participate in SDN.  Aggregation and knowledge and self-categorization has created an environment where you know the guy who is giving advice may have a point ranking that shows they don't have a life, but a lot of knowledge.  We are contributing perhaps 20% of the content.  Average time from Q&A is less than 30 minutes, I wish our support channels were that effective.

I hear that Q&A through formal channels it's a day and a half, and probably at a cost for $85 to $245 per incident).  Step back and think about it for a moment.  It's the value proposition of a public community interface to an enterprise.  In this case, it is for software developers.  But what would happen if community was broadened to the whole ecosystem?

Shh...it's under construction here.