The show Bryant Park Project has been off the air for 2 show days and what is happening?

There are nearly 300 members of the BPP Diner that are assembling at a NIng site that is there to catch the fall out from the show.

This is twice the norms of the Dunbar number of 150 that will assure a healthy self-regulated site. My sense if that the site will grow much larger.

In only a few days I am seeing a number of patterns:

• Grieving - so important to tell the stories of the deceased many are humorous - just like we do after a person has died. In fact part of the site reminds me so much of being with friends and family grieving a loved one. This is so much more than a show being canceled
• Anger - I have set one rule for the site - Just be nice - this is a hard line but most are there but there is a lot of anger
• Relief - one of the parts of BPP that was not there except on Twitter was the ability of the members to interact with each other - many are so happy to be able to do this
• Global - many come from all over the world - we are all a bit stunned by the geography - Russia, France, Israel - so is Public Media really just American anymore?
• Struggle - to learn how the software really works - Ning is very intuitive but now there are a lot of people using it with varied experience - it could be easier - many cant see the Music link and the forum is constrained
• Getting lost - with so many people doing stuff - I can’t keep up any more and I am wondering how we are going to make sense of it all - I am hoping that Groups of interest will form
• It’s a world - the site is so big, so dynamic and so varied already that you can disappear into it for hours - redefines content for me

But I think one of things that we all miss is more structure - a hard core centre of content. I suspect that if we cannot repalce this - the site will die for nostalgia can only supply so much energy

My bottom lne is that the site is a very important experiment - can a community site with only a handful of volunteer admins create enough energy from content to keep us all coming back and to expand the site?

If we can find the answer, then we will have found the holy grail I think

So my friends - what to do - how do we put a sun into the centre of this system that will act as both the gravity pull and the energy push?