Last March at the Community 2.0 conference, I moderated a panel on how companies can use communities in their new product development processes. A a main theme sounded not just in my panel, but throughout that conference, was the notion of value. I’m seeing that theme pop up in nearly all of the posts in this conversation. And not just *where’s* the value, but also *how* is value created for all the different community members?

When Kevin Werbach says here that he sees the New Network as a “broader concept than [fill-in-the-blank] 2.0, because it’s less about comparisons with the past, and more about describing the future,” what I read there is that [fill-in-the-blank] 2.0 may perhaps be more about technology upgardes and the New Network may be more about the value proposition for those in the network. Says Kevin,

“If the starting point is a broadband Internet, with massive aggregation and services platforms like Google, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!, and a host mechanisms for linking data in powerful ways, what appears now that couldn’t take hold before?”

The answer is, whatever those in the network find of value to them.

Then, in Kevin Werbach’s podcast interview with Google’s Sheryl Sandberg, she pinpoints the different approach Google brought to advertising in terms of value—rather than simply selling advertising space, Google consciously placed a higher value on the space by making sure that ads provided relevant information for people at the very point where they would need it. Shifting the value proposition from the advertisers to the users/readers was a radical move.

In a later post, Mitch Ratcliffe says of community,

“Traditional ownership roles are besnargled by the value inherent in each participant’s contribution that adds up to the value of the whole system. This means that the “asset” traditionally thought to be owned by investors is only a part—and, typically, a small part—of the value people come to expect from the site, service or product that is the iware system.”

What he’s saying, I think, is that we don’t really understand where all of the members and sponsors of a community will find value. And perhaps that the value proposition is likely to be different for different kinds of communities, even or different members of the same community—a level of complexity that will have to be navigated by both businesses trying to figure out how to grow and innovate in this new world, and also by individuals. We’re already doing it, making decisions every day about how and on what we want to spend our time, attention, and creativity.