He highlighted that community is not a tool (saying that you are a tool for approaching it like that) and that you need to leave your ego at the door to make it happen. I also love that he stressed the importance of letting go of control and letting leadership emerge naturally.
Nice perspective on day 1 of LeWeb – interpreting LeWeb as a community and not as a conference is fitting in here too. One can’t manage and control a community, but one can provide the infrastructure that allows for emergence (freeform conversations flourish here, even when it’s sometime hard to find individual people) – but that’s a minor disadvantage of any huge conference.
Curating networks at conferences is probably an open task – Techweb and O’Reilly did a little bit this with crowdvine at the Web 2.0 Expos – but leveraging the content and interest networks like Pearltrees is trying might be another lever.