Hey crelf.
If you look back to a blog post I made after re-visiting LAVA back in late March:
I have been thinking a lot about Community lately, and how we have a long way to go from a feature and strategy standpoint. National Instruments as a company has a great community of users, primarily centered around LabVIEW. We need to do a better job at partnering with them.
There are several ways I think we can partner better together. Since I live primarily in the web-technology world, I can really only speak to those things, but there are plenty of others as well.
I think we can provide better content sharing, where you somehow can find content from all of our partner sites in a centralized format. I think we can do a better job of understanding what forum/web features the community is interested in, and working together to make those happen either on an NI web property, or on a site like LAVA.
One important thing to note is that, strategically, it doesn't make sense for NI to "control" everything that is being discussed, shared, and produced. Communities like LAVA help out in so many ways - they allow for an honest, objective look at our products - and this is a very good thing for NI.
Speaking specifically about community.ni.com - its primary purpose was to replace the old examples submission system, where you essentially put your content into a vacuum.