The word “community” has grown a great deal in the last decade thanks to the advent of social media. While we’ve always had local communities where we live, we now have online communities large, like the San Francisco Giants’ 2.8 million Facebook fans) and small, like scrappy groups of gamers trying to restore an incomplete game. However, the perspective on what an online and offline community is has grown exponentially.

For example, Assembly is a former YCombinator graduate that has created an online community (even a social network) that can easily turn into a software company. Products as early as a simple idea to fully-established projects can join Assembly and members of the community can follow and even join the company, eventually become owners of the company through any skill they have, including coding, design and product strategy. While it’s become common for social networks to include pages dedicated to companies to follow their projects, Assembly takes it a step further by integrating “followers” into projects so intimately that they’re effectively co-founders.  This has led to random followers (as diverse as you’d find on Twitter TWTR -1.96% or Facebook) from all over the world helping them create a diverse portfolio of software projects.

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