Afterthoughts

Over the past several weeks I’ve talked about redefining the word community but what I’m really doing is returning community to its truest form.

Community is difficult to define because it’s something that’s hard for objective observers to see even though community members can feel it. Many have tried to go about it, specifying objective indicators such as the tools that group members use, the types of interactions they have with one another and even diminishing the relevance of how much time is spent together by a group’s members. Many of them sound right but just don’t feel right because they’re missing the truth of it all: community is something you feel.

A community is a group of people who feel a “sense of community”.

Thankfully, a “sense of community” is relatively well defined, thanks to the work of many community psychology scholars, in particular McMillan and Chavis. Their 1986 paper, Sense of community: a theory and definition, tells us everything we need to know about how to identify when someone is experiencing a sense of community. If enough members of a group are feeling a sense of community, it is reasonable to suggest that their group is therefore itself a community.

So, let’s go back over how a sense of community is defined. For the purposes of clarity and to save you some time, I’ll do this in point-form. If you want to learn more, follow the link to the relevant article.

A sense of community has the following four key elements:

Membership

• A demonstrable boundary between those who are members and those who are not (us vs them)
• The boundary can be:
• • geographical
  • access-oriented, only those who have access to something are part of it
  • a label, requiring a tag, badge or title
  • a rite-of-passage, requiring the completion of a task
  • a shared system of symbols such as uniforms, handshakes, subcultural dialects, or private memes
  • a combination of all of the above
• Members use the boundary to identify one another
• Members use the boundary to identify new members

Influence

• The ability for a member to influence the rest of the community
• The ability for the community to influence each of its members
• The ability for the community to influence external parties
• Can also be looked at as “trust”, as in “we share things with one another” not “we listened to our customers!”

Fulfilment

• The need that instigated joining the community must be satisfied, or is replaced with a new need that must be satisfied
• Giving to the community will result in fulfilment of needs
• Communities have an economy of social trade, often fuelled by mutual reinforcement of one another and of the community
• Going above and beyond in supporting the community will not only fulfil a member’s own needs but also further those of the community; the rewards range from a stronger community to all sorts of other unexpected benefits

Connection

• A shared emotional connection is possibly the most important element for true community
• Frequent high-quality interaction will result in stronger bonds between members
• Communities that have a purpose and shared tasks will develop greater group cohesion
• Members sharing a major community event will be more strongly connected to one another
• Can develop into a spiritual bond, like Aussie “mateship”

You’ll notice these four elements have a lot of potential for interrelation and overlap. That interconnectedness of the elements is important — to truly exist a sense of community requires all four elements.

At the end of my post on Connection I cobbled together a final definition of community. It was:

“Community is a group of people who, together, share the feeling they belong to something, can influence and be influenced by one another, and can have their needs fulfilled by fulfilling the needs of the group.”

The truth is I knew the process would end with that result. If it were that easy, community would have been more clearly defined long ago.

The innovation I’m introducing here isn’t an innovation at all. It’s just a long forgotten technique for looking at community: observing it from the inside instead of the outside.

A community is a group of people who experience a sense of community.

If you’re building a community, you should focus on helping your members find that sense of community. The rest will follow on its own.

If you loved this series, be sure to subscribe in your favourite RSS reader, as I’ll soon be making available a free e-book including all of this re-defining info. You can subscribe here.

Posted from Greg Lexiphanic | Comment »