Afterthoughts

In my previous two posts, What is a community? and Un-defining community, I talked about popular perceptions of community and the inability for our current definitions to address that certain difference in “community”, that je ne sais quoi that stands it apart in our minds from “a group of people standing around discussing a particular shared interest”.

Now that I’ve deconstructed the others, it’s time to build a new definition.

(Sidenote: speaking of building, Quiip, who I work for, has just launched its new website — go take a look!)

For several decades, psychologists have talked about “a sense of community”. In a nutshell, a sense of community is what you feel when you’re a member of a community (here’s Wikipedia’s summary). For me, credit must go to psychologists McMillan & Chavis, whose paper “Sense of community: a theory and definition” (1986) is what really gave me a new perspective on this tricky subject.

Their paper proposes that, if members can declare that certain key criteria are fulfilled, it can be said that they have a “sense of community”. There are four key elements to a sense of community:

1. Membership
2. Influence
3. Fulfilment of needs
4. Shared emotional connection

What I propose is that, if each of these elements is present among the members of a group, then I believe it is reasonable to call that group a community. I propose community be defined not by how it appears from the outside but by how its members experience it from within. Therefore, a group of people is a community if a sense of community is felt by its members.

So, here’s a quick and simple re-definition of community:

Community is a group of people whose members experience a sense of community.

Right now, this might not seem like it says a lot, but what we are doing here is laying a foundation. From here we’re going to build a new modern definition for community.

Nonetheless, in all cases, whether you’re identifying a community or starting a new one, if your aim is to provide each member with a sense of community, you can be assured of success.

Over the next few posts I’m going to go explain how each of the elements of a sense of community work together to form that singular feeling of community. At the end, we’ll roll it all together into a new definition of community; something we can start using for modern communities and those of the future.

Posted from Greg Lexiphanic | Comment »