Bootstrapping abroad

Nick Lewis posted on his blog 6 conditions that will form an online community. http://www.nicklewis.org/node/956

Some time ago I found an interesting talk about "the starfish and the spider" that makes the case that communities that lack hierarchy will be more resilient.
http://www.beckstrom.com/Main_Page

Online communities are also ecosystems and therefore:
-there are certain sequences of adding species that will lead to a stable system (e.g. bring in the endusers to early and your community crashes because a lack of content)
-the more niches you have in an ecosystem the more diverse species can live on it (e.g. the endless list of modules in the Drupal community)
-the more diverse species in your system the more stable it becomes (e.g. survive disasters like the disappearance of a certain user type)

There is a really interesting read on this subject at http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch4-a.html I don't know how you can translate this into online communities, but I'm sure there are some more interesting lessons in there. Do you know any additional conclusions that can be drawn from this?