Community Rant

It's been a while since I have written been busy with trying to do some new things with Map3D and got my new Motorola Droid so had to transfer my life to that.

Well, This week a lot of people are headed to Vegas for AU2009 . Even more will be looking online with AU Virtual . This brings me to my question or rant about the community of users.

There is a huge community of users for every Autodesk product. Most of these people use the discussion boards to ask questions and get answers. It really is an amazing tool in that thousands of people will take time out of their lives just to help you with your problem. The questions I have is can we do more. Is there a next step. EE has down a good job of trying to create a platform for discussion, chat, and Q&A. While I see lots of people registered for the site I don't see much participation. Why?
I have create a social media site through Ning but that hasn't lead to much discussion either. I've been involved with my local reseller in trying to get a users group together and every meeting has less and less people attending. Maybe they feel it's a pitch since it's through the reseller. I don't know. In this down economy are people really all that busy? To busy to network and get free help and advice?

I know there are local user groups that are active. They seem to be more on the architectural side. Are architects more social than engineers? Is there a secret key or formula?