So, Just What Exactly Is “Community”, Anyway?
Written by Russ on December 1, 2007 – 1:46 pmI kind of hate those informational pieces that start out with a definition, but somehow, it really makes sense to start out this way.
Wikipedia says this:
A community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.
I’ll do a little dissecting here–A community is a group of people (users, members) that come together in a single location (website) and have some similar beliefs, values, goals, etc.
A bunch of people who have something in common and go to a single location to do something about it.
People, with [some] shared thing(s) who frequent a same location and interact.
Wow, I think I got it. And to think, I’ve been working in community for a few years now and have yet to actually force myself to come up with something pretty earth-shatteringly basic.
Awesome! We’ve got the hard part–the definition that seems to make a lot of sense and seems to be pretty basic–down.
Now what?
Well, now we have to figure out exactly who those users are (demo/ehtnographics), what the thing(s) are that they share/have in common, and how they want/need to interact.
And the answer, from this Information Architect’s perspective is a pretty standard one:
It depends.
And that makes this the point where everyone should start to roll up their sleeves, dig in their heels and truly try to figure out, well, as much as can be figured out.
It’s also where I’m going to stop for this post, because a lot has been accomplished on getting into the depths of defining your community–we’ve come to a common agreement on what, exactly, community is, as a whole. Not what “our” community is for this effort (project), but we’ve got a good starting point. We’ve got our first slide in the PowerPoint presentation that we’ve got to give to the client tomorrow morning at 9am, which really doesn’t help you much if this is my first post and you just happened to find it, well, now.
It’s also a pretty good point because this is really where it can start to get complicated. I’ve worked with building a variety of online communities, so we should know that online is going to be the focus. For the intents of what I’ll be talking about, I’ll most likely focus on what I’ve worked on in the past–but I’m always looking for something more, something different and untried and that always exists, even if it is pure speculation.
I’m sure there will be plenty of that, too.
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