Afterthoughts

In the previous post — Community: building a definition for 2011 — I established a foundation for a re-definition of community. Over the next handful of entries, I’ll be erecting the walls and raising the structure.

As discussed in the previous post, a sense of community has 4 main elements:

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

When someone feels a sense of community, part of that is a feeling of membership, something that sets themselves and their fellow community members apart from everyone else.

How do we identify membership?

At it’s most simplistic, we can say that membership is a boundary. It’s what delineates between those who are members of the prospective community and those who are not.

Sometimes this boundary can be quite easy to detect. It might be geographical/spatial; require a tag, badge or title; require the completion of a task (which usually results in a tag, badge or title); or simply that you maintain a presence.

And sometimes it’s more obtuse. It could be the willingness to share more with this group than one would with another group, which is in itself a feeling of emotional safety.

It could be a shared system of symbols. The system of symbols can be obvious things such as rituals, uniforms or a secret handshake, or something more subtle such as your own set of acronyms and shorthands. The very early Twitter community (when it was still a community, instead of a platform) developed and adopted their own shorthand with the @reply and #hashtag. Using these outside the community left non-members confused (or they thought it was a typo). But for those who knew what it meant, an instant connection could be formed. Putting an @ before one’s username anywhere outside Twitter is an indicator that “Yes, I tweet.”
I once attended a Twitter meetup in the platform’s early days. A friend there introduced me as “at-lexiphanic” (@lexiphanic), followed by my real name. The “at” name placed me within the community’s context and, almost by its presence, placed everyone at ease. “He is one of us.”

The key here is that one can’t feel a sense of community if you don’t know who your fellow community members are. A sense of community is never experienced alone; knowing who else shares your membership boundaries helps you to more clearly see those shared borders.

With membership as one of the four main elements of a sense of community, we can expand our definition:

Community is a group of people who feel like they belong to something.

It’s still unfinished but that’s OK; there’s more to come.

Next up: Influence.

Posted from Greg Lexiphanic | Comment »