Brains working towards machine consciousness

In many ways, your Personal Learning Network is like a personal Community of Practice. Something about the people you choose to have in your PLN links them to the things you want to learn, in the ways you want to learn it. You get to decide who is in your PLN, adding and removing people in order to meet your learning needs. Consequently, you are the 'benign dictator' in a network of people who may not even realise that they are a part of it. Additionally, of course, each of those individuals has their own network, of which you may, or may not, be part.
I would argue that the Community of Practice, as described by Wenger et al, supervenes on the personal networks. It is a higher order entity, formed with a communally agreed purpose. Similar ad hoc networks also form when people work together, with their networks overlapping and either their aims or methods being similar enough to allow for common practice or at least sharing of information.
In your PLN, you are necessarily responsible for acting in all the roles necessary to maintain it. You select who is a part of it, and you select which tools are used to facilitate communication (although you may have to use those tools your members use if you want to keep in touch with them). You decide on the goals of the PLN, which may shift much more quickly than in a more democratic environment.