The smaller the online community, the more that members may participate in it.

That's the contention of Communispace, a Watertown, Mass. company that creates private online communities for companies. The company analyzed participation behavior among the 26,539 members of 66 individual private online communities it manages and found that smaller, intimate communities seem to inspire greater levels of participation. More like a neighborhood, if you will.

The company says that roughly 86 percent of people who log in to private communities with an average size of 300-500 people contribute content to it. They post comments, initiate conversations, participate
in chats, brainstorm ideas or share photos. Fourteen percent of members in smaller communities tend to lurk. This contrasts with the 1% Rule, which posits that about 1% of visitors to an open, democratized forum will create content for it, while 10% of all visitors synthesize that content and the remaining 90% lurk.

Communispace does not create the typical customer community. Their small private communities are designed to deliver feedback on products, advertising campaign ideas, etc. That contrasts with open, user-generated content communities such as Wikipedia or Channel 9, where a good deal of the site's value is generated by larger numbers of participants who use it as a peer-to-peer support forum and/or a social network.

The company's white paper (PDF) on its community work is here.