Communities and corporations

What role should corporations play in the communities that form around their products?

This is a topic that has probably been beaten to death by folks like Chris Locke and David Weinberger, so of course, since it's the net, I'll add a few whacks.

So, what role? Should they be covert shills, like "journalist" Armstrong Williams and his ilk? Should they openly partake in the community, with full disclosure about their affiliations? Should they post from corporate addresses? In whatever guise, should they try to strongly influence the community's direction toward an end better suited to the corporation's needs, or should they allow the community to move on its own?

How does knowing that a poster is an employee influence your take on their community contributions? How dramatically does the level of disclosure change that? Does your opinion differ on whether they're encouraged to participate "on their own time" or if they're actively encouraged to include blogging or other community activities as part of their day-to-day work activities?

Do mailing lists, blogs and newsgroups have different standards of "quality" in this regard?

Should I ask more wildly open-ended questions? Yes!

What got me thinking about all this again is tangentially related to my post below about the Solaris x86 yahoo list, but mostly the upcoming OpenSolaris release and the community that's forming around it. There's lots of positive buzz from the Sun corporate blogosphere. Unfortunately there is also much suspicion and derision from a variety of Linux folk, and not a small amount of it is based on a strong suspicion of Sun's motivations. My guess is that the maturity of the existing Solaris product, and the already-established Solaris communities will go a long way toward helping OpenSolaris succeed. Sun can help or hinder that effort, depending on its participation. If Sun is too forceful in directing the effort, it will be seen by the naysayers as proof that Sun "can't let go." It also seems obvious that Sun just "throwing the code over the wall" will make the initial community development more difficult. What's less obvious is where the balance is -- and I guess that makes sense, if it was easy, all corporate-sponsored communities would be great successes. I'm sure there are smart people working on it, and I hope it works out for the best. How do you think the OpenSolaris community will best be developed? Will you be part of it? What do you see as examples of well-functioning communities, and how strong is corporate involvement in them?