Redefining Communities in a slow news week.

[Doc Searls (l) with Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger. Photo by Shel]

Jeremiah complains this is a slow news week. Between the holidays. It seems to me that you have to be a worse workaholic than I am to lament a week that let's you look up and around a bit. Over on Twitter, he seems to be back in a debate that seems to come up whenever we people centered on social media have a slow news week.

What is a community? Who runs a community? Who cares?

The definition of community really hasn't been much changed since the Internet came in. Since the advent of social media, there are a lot more communities and a great many people belong to more communities than they used to.

But by defintion, they remain the same. Communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest.  Historically, that common interest could be geography, a profession, a religion, a political affiliation or even a hobby like stamp collecting.

The Internet has reduced the physical boundaries of community. You can now have a strong bind with community members you have never met. It is based on shared passion and interest. Communities are like living bodies, in that the health of the body is more important, in the long run, than the continiuation of any one component. If it's your body, you will want to have the wart of cander removed for your health.  If it is your physical neighborhood, you will want that burned-out, graffiti-tagged building taken down.

Yes, companies can build communities.  Governments can do it as well. The results are often bad. Ford Motors built company towns in the middle of the last century.  They owned everything, the streets, the homes, the schools, the churches, even the cars people could buy. Ford decided if you could stay or be evicted and in the end most people decided the company town was a bad place to live.

Some companies still want to build online communities, with walls and gates. They want to own the community residents, and like the Ford Factory towns, this is generally a bad thing. People need to own their own communities.  When they have bad leaders, or too much crime, or poor education, or poor enforcement bodies, they tend to find a way to leave and go elsewhere to enjoy greater freedom.

On Jeremiah's Twitter conversation, someone noted that Facebook's customers are not the millions of users, but the marketer who have come in, who will support FaceBook in its desire to have a decent return on investment. This may sound like an obvious truth.  Some people think users have been spoiled by free services and content and they just have to accept that it's no longer like that.

I disagree. When the community rules become unjust (my theme for today), community members will just up and leave. The will go somewhere else where they have greater freedom.  Facebook is just a piece of virtually geography, and people will have very little trouble moving to another location, where they can share passion and information with people who will join them there.

As Jeremiah well knows, the power of a community is ultimately in the hands of te community members. The real leaders of a community will only remain leaders if they remain generous to the community itself. This is a concept that is very difficult for marketers to grasp. They need to go study what Doc Searls has to say about an Intention Economy, then they need to figure out how to provide it.

If not, every time they show up in numbers, the members of a community will just leave.

It's funny. I feel like I've written all this before. But then again, it's a slow news week.

Comments

[Jeremiah Owyang]

useful post, the definition is simple and succint.

I remember you telling me about the Ford town and how people ended up not wanting to be part of it.

"When the community rules become unjust (my theme for today), community members will just up and leave. The will go somewhere else where they have greater freedom"

However, take Facebook for example, the amount of people that were not happy with the newspage and beacon, they still persist and are part of the community, they've not gotten up and left in droves.

[shel israel]

Jeremiah,

My response is that they have not yet gotten up in droves yet. Communities ill forgive leaders mistakes and even a series of tem. It is the habit of many people to use Facebook every day and very few of us have started to wander away. But in the end, Facebook needs to figure out a way to make money without pissing of its user base and this is a very tricky issue. If they treat the marketers as their real customers for too long, then people will just up and leave--slowly at first, but then entire neighborhoods will get up and go. Once they are gone, as MySpace is struggling with, it is very difficult to get them to come back. It's like getting a call from an old girlfriend, after you have become happy with a new one.

[KD Paine]

But true communities build social capital, support each other in the down times, and don't just take off on a whim. The question is, will social networks build social capital or just redefine it.

[Tara Hunt]

Glad that I logged into twitter to see you point to this, Shel! Great post and I hope it nips the 'marketers' conversation. It's a citizen-centric world now (or moving there very quickly) and the same choice that has been central to feed our consumerist drives has been appended with voice and come back to haunt many who want to continue to exploit us.

You and Doc are voices of reason in this debate.

[Nancy White]

I'd add one crucial bit to the definition - "over time." To come together for a moment is for me different than the bonds we share over time.

You might be interested in the del.icio.us tag "community_indicators" http://del.icio.us/tag/community_indicators

(And I won't blog about this because this week I'm spending most of my time with my family-community!)