If you like what Ross says, check out his post today from the Enterprise 2.0 conference: http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/how_to_build_an.html . He gives a faithful blowby-blow of the panelists’ discussion, including Motorola’s Toby Redshaw’s account of just the kind of “emergence” deployment strategy you mention.

Quoting from Ross’s account, Toby says of Motorola’s social technology deployments: “The actual information is driven by 250 knowledge champions, selected by the community. A badge of honor to be a champion, shepard the wiki. I get calls that say, did you know we have 4000 blogs, are they doing anything bad? Yeah, probably. Can we control it? Yes, give me 400 people to monitor it, but it will kill it.”

In Motorola’s example, a foward-thinking IT group provide standard platforms and leaves the knowledge hive free to self-organize.