• An email list, mainly for announcing upcoming calls, although occasionally someone will reply
• A wiki that lists ideas for upcoming calls and describes each speaker and provides some helpful links for each call
• A free phone bridge that makes an audio recording
• A podcast set-up for people who missed the call
• An IRC channel

Here are some of the practices that make it work:

• Short calls at a regular time (nominally 35 minutes, but they often go longer)
• Jerry always reminds people to mute themselves, and there haven’t been too many accidents such as people putting the call on a musical hold
• Jerry’s summary at the end of each call is a feat of comprehension and a useful review that gives you the feeling of a good “take away”
• The IRC channel supports the phone call and lets people share resources, heckle, queue up questions, and greet each other

A few months ago I was in a brainstorming session with Jerry and some other guys to talk about what might be added or changed.  Turns out that improving on this mix is difficult, suggesting that it might be the “minimum that would work” (to use Ward Cunningham’s phrase to describe his design goals for the first wiki).

• There is a twitter-stream which seems to augment the email announcements and supplement, but not replace, the IRC channel
• There is a huge back-channel that makes it all work; among other things, Jerry runs a retreat that brings innovators and techies together once a year

Thinking about this digital habitat led me to think about the business model or economic niche around this community.  I took a crack at describing it using Alexander Osterwalder‘s business model canvas:

Obviously there is a lot more to say and my guesses may be off, but:

• Whatever the mix of technologies and other resources are that support Yi-Tan, they work.  Three hundred weekly calls is about as close to “sustainable” as we get these days.  Whatever the business model of the Yi-Tan community is, it works.
• There is something really important about free-standing communities like Yi-Tan: they generate a lot of cross-pollination and idea-hatching.  I’m sure a lot of other people go to these calls just for the mind-stretching.  But the business model question is most important for just that kind of community (I’m not saying that Osterwalder’s scheme exactly works to describe the workings of a community, but it’s closer than anything else I’ve seen.)
• There is a kind of fitness and leanness about the Yi-Tan community’s set-up that those of us who work to set up and support communities for a living should think hard about.  Lavish support can lead to stupor so we need to be careful to not aim to set our fees as a percentage of whatever lavishness can be squeezed out of a corporation or a grant.

Once I do explain it to people they’ll often say, “Wow, that’s a pretty narrow niche!”  It’s true, but look at three talks that I’m working on right now:

• Provided that the trains run smoothly in Spain, today I’m meeting with people from the ministry of education in Colombia to give feedback on a plan for communities of practice for educators.  It’s fascinating to see all the connections between education in the US and in Colombia.  It’s a bit of extra effort to read their plan, which is in Spanish.  It took me a while, for example to figure out that “taslapada” was a typo and they meant “traslapada” (overlapped).  Before I figured it out, I was grumbling to myself, “Why do educators have to use such obscure language?”
• Next Wednesday night I’m giving a talk at CHIFOO that feels ambitious to me.  I’m trying to do two different things. First, I’m arguing that design “in a Web 2.0 world” has to start with communities, not end there, as an afterthought.  And second I’m pushing the idea of getting everyone to tag stuff that’s relevant to the year’s discussions (“Collaboration at Work: Putting the ‘Us’ in User Experience”).  I think a lot of people have found that once a community finds its groove in face-to-face mode, it’s difficult to add a tool to its repertoire, even when the community is made up of folks that are as smart as the CHIFOO folks.  (Maybe it will be eaiser than I’ve thought, since any face-to-face discussion more than 50 items have been tagged so far since I proposed the tag in early December: http://delicious.com/tag/chifoo09.
• The Wednesday after that I’m doing a talk with Beverly Trayner at  the Human Capital Institute.  I’m afraid that we’ve promised to explain how all the world’s e-learning problems can be solved in one hour.  Not only that, we’re doing the presentation on a webinar platform which has not been my favorite type of software but which I’m finally going to have to deal with.

So I may be very “niched”, but I’m also feeling very stretched.  Yay!