Elements of Community

Shared Identity
The lifeblood of a robust community is the creation of a shared identity, deepening the ‘pools of shared meaning’ and forming a community narrative while fostering attachment.

Organizational learning
Organizational learning is best enabled when the philosophy behind communities of practice are clearly defined; their goals, mission and vision are explicit and tangible. Over time, this results in the development of shared mental models and a shared purpose. Sustainability results when systems thinking or the feedback loop is vibrant and vital.

Negotiation of Meaning
The negotiation of meaning is how we experience the world and our engagement in it as meaningful. This is where experiential meets existential in the community; activities and conversations that translate into deeper shared understanding and learning.

Tangibility
Tangibility involves turning the abstract into a ‘congealed’ form, for instance in documents, symbols and other artifacts. Tangibility takes abstract ideas and group activity and turns them into coordinated, mutual understanding.

Active Participation
Active participation (rather than passive) is active involvement in social process. It involves participation not just in translating the tangible ideas into embodied experience, but in recontextualising and personalizing its meaning. Eventually, this leads to the self organization that creates the most robust and engaged communities.

Alignment of Individuals
Alignment requires the ability to co-ordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. The challenge of alignment is to connect local efforts to broader goals and conversations in ways that allow ‘learners’ to invest their energy into common (but personalized) vision.

Knowledge-ability and Scaffolding
Knowledge-ability enables the work of community building and guarantees that diverse participants have access to the resources necessary to learn, and the perspectives and thought leadership required to make sense of the ideas. Young communities need rapid but solid scaffolding to support it's growth and development.

Boundary Encounters
Encounters involving sharing (best) practices and perspectives among naturally evolving groups within the community. These encounters involve connections that effect and align the way each cluster connects to support common goals. Crucial to the success of the boundary encounter is the role of highly skilled brokers, who straddle different groups and exchange process.

Brokers and Brokering
The job of brokering is the translation, co-ordination and alignment between perspectives and ideas. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention and address conflicting interests. Toward this end, brokering provides a participatory connection, based on experience, expertise and judgment.

For a deeper dive into these ideas, I'd suggest the works of Etienne Wenger and Peter Senge.

Comments

[Hiten]

With great power comes great responsibility.

Being a broker means priority access to disparate information hubs- your influence on budding ideas is tremendous.

Brokers have the power to co-ordinate, enhance, and streamline, but also the power to maim, distort & manipulate. Expertise & legitimacy in a purely social project must be determined by the people- perhaps a 'RESPECT' system in which user privileges increase as the community gives consistent +ve feedback?

Think a souped-up ebay seller reliability system with a twist...If you help someone through an insightful comment or tweak, they can reward you with 'mad props'. The more props you get, the earlier the notifications about new projects, the greater your 'reach' (a la LinkedIn), etc.

Brokers anointed by the people instead of His Fordship- now that's true social media :)

[Bennett]

Hiten, your comments are better than my posts...i'll eamil you today bro.