Communities of Exploration

Dion Hinchcliffe has a new post discussing "online customer communities", which triggered these thoughts:

• It seems like there's two broad online community types: top-down and bottom-up.
• The top-down types are often associated with formal organizations that have a specific mission and associated goals. The two types I think of (often associated with Knowledge Management) are Communities of Practice (cut across multiple organizations, but the Practice tends to be a formal organizational function and usually has a formal body of knowledge) and Communities of Interest (see, for example, how the US DoD has defined this).
• The bottom-up types are less well-defined, but Dion describes 3 broad categories: Social Networks, Grassroots, and Customer. I realize that Dion calls Customer "top-down", but I'm using "top-down" in the governance sense of the word. Since Customers are by definition not governable in a traditional sense, I'm calling them bottom-up...but they could eventually evolve into something that's a mixture of both.
• Finally, it would seem that both types (bottom-up and top-down) are struggling with structure.
  
• The top-down communities have too much structure to achieve the adaptability and agility organizations desire. So, they're introducing bottom-up concepts (e.g., tagging) and hoping that will do it. I personally think these concepts have some value, but that the real issues revolve around agile/adaptable governance and what might be called composable community objects (process fragments, data/info objects, etc.), not some "emergence magic."
• The bottom-up communities have too little structure to reliably allow coherent action toward a specific goal. Dion's post offers a number of helpful insights into this issue with some interesting suggestions. But, this feels like a topic that's still in the forming stage.
  
• I'm a little uneasy with the Deloitte SlideShare that proposes a "tribalism" metaphor. I like the implication of adaptability and shared purpose. But, "tribalism" also seems to imply a structure (governance and community objects) that is too static for most online communities.
• How soft issues like trust and identity interact with structural issues is still very unclear...but since both areas are important, how they interact/relate seems like an important question that should yield valuable insights.

I like the Exploitation-Exploration contrast, so I wonder if the right balance of top-down and bottom-up might be called a "Community of Exploration." Regardless, I don't expect to see a mature understanding of this concept in the near future.