I just went back to something I wrote four years ago in Shanghai, working on a letter about my early days in publishing and how they shaped what Berkshire Publishing Group is becoming today, and found that I was writing then about community as well as about my October letter’s subject: the “two cultures” and how we are working to bring this great divide through interdisciplinary collaboration. I’ve also been thinking about the protests near Wall Street in New York, only a couple miles from where I sit on a miraculously warm and bright October day, and about the role our sense of community (as well as the lack of a sense of community) plays in both the protests and the financial system that is at issue. Here’s what I commented in 2007 at the Berkshire Blog:

When I attend events with lots of Internet-savvy people, like this forum in Shanghai on Nurturing and Commercializing Online Communities, I