Full Circle Associates

Warning... long blog post!

After sliding into this (un)project on “community indicators” over the last month, it’s time to try and explain myself.

My friends have been asking for a definition. I hedged. I’ll confess, I worried. By defining it, would I squish the life out of an idea? Ah, me of little faith.

Today I decided I’d go for it because, hey, "trust in your community" is a community indicator. Having friends who keep kindly and gently bugging you to make yourself clearer is a community indicator. So if I am living in this pool of indicators, I certainly can make a stab at describing community indicators in the context of online communities.

First, the concept of "community indicators" is not a new idea. Community indicators have been used in geographic based communities for some time. (See 1 below.) I'm more specifically interested in distributed and online community indicators. Or the intersection between online and F2F communities and their respective indicators.

Second, this is still half baked. This is my first try. I hope you, my community, will ask me hard questions, offer suggestions for improvement so that in a week or two, we’ll actually have something useful. Yes, that activity would be yet another community indicator. Recursive, eh?

Grounding: What is a Community?
Before we can talk about community indicators, we have to have some common ground about what we mean by “community.” I tried this a few years back with an article, How Some Folks Have Tried to Define Community and What is a Virtual Community and Why Would You Ever Need One?. Earlier this year Jake the Community guy posted his musings which were picked up and expanded upon here. Good stuff.

I’ll offer my definition, knowing full well that it is insufficient to describe the human group called community, and the myriad of ways we experience and understand it.

Community: A group of people (online and/or F2F) who regularly interact around a shared purpose or interest and form relationships over time. Or more informally, a gathering of people with a shared interest or purpose who communicate, connect, and get to know each other better over time.

Signs of Life: A starting point
But wait – there are all kinds of interactions that provide the catalyst for relationship and shared purpose, but which may not be within the more defined boundaries of a community. Networks are such a powerful force these days and the line between a network and a community online can be hard to see. We observe signs of life all the time as people connect online – strangers read each others’ blogs and follow their tags. These “signs of life” (SoLs) (http://www.technorati.com/tag/signsoflife ) come before community indicators (CIs for shorthand here).

Examples of signs of life are adoption of tags in online networks like http://www.Flickr.com, blogrolls on blogs of people the blog owner does not have a relationship with, kindness to strangers, notices and pictures on a F2F bulletin board in a café or a ripple of an idea across blogs that never settles in one place, but starts showing us new people with whom we might want to connect.

SoL are like weather reports. They give us an inkling of what might be coming. They are like ideas that wake us up in the night, but which we can only partially remember in the morning. Like the first bulbs peeking up through the snow to assure us spring is coming, even if we have to wait two more months. SoLs reassure us that this is a human endeavor and community may emerge.

Confession: I don't know where signs of life stop and community indicators begin. And sometimes I can't tell them apart, so this may not be a useful tag.

Community Indicators
If signs of life are flags for the possibility of community, community indicators are the signs that community is or has formed. As Shawn Callahan wrote, they are a bit like indicator species in an ecosystem.

I’m not sure if the following analogy has already been drawn, but community indicators are like indicator species; they indicate the health of a the community/ecosystem. Green frogs are my favourite ecosystem example-albeit an inaccurate and imprecise one. If a green frog is an indicator species of a healthy ecosystem, introducing a gross of green frogs doesn’t improve the ecosystem’s health.

Community indicators are patterns of group member behavior that help us pay attention to the emergence and life of a community. Some examples include when people start invent language together.; when we start talking about heart, and love, when we feel comfortable enough to start talking about difficult issues and we stick around for the end of the conversation, not just the start. When we start caring for the group as well as ourselves as individuals. When we decide it is time to go F2F; time to share our chocolate; to create t-shirts and badges to identify ourselves.

Indicators are not all strength-based. Like anything, there is the light and dark of community and light and dark of a community’s indicators. This is not the utopian view. Dark indicators might include signs of exclusion, power and control struggles, banning and red-lining. Communities have their weaknesses that are visible in indicators.

So why?
So why are community indicators useful, particularly when we are talking about distributed community which mostly manifest online? Again, Shawn wrote,

“These indicators help people inside the community understand and nurture their ‘environment’…”

Bingo. They help us become aware of our community, visualize it, understand it and can trigger our practices to nurture and support the community. After over a year of blogging, I have gone from seeing the practice of blogging as a predominantly individual act to one that is highly networked and often part of community life. I had to immerse myself in the practice to see those signs. Thus my interest in trying to describe them.

Seb Paquet taught me my first explicit blogging community indicator: welcoming. When Seb noticed a new person blogging who he knew or was interested in, he blogged a welcome post, linking to that person’s blog and, if available, a picture. Immediately Seb connected me to his community and expanded mine. I now follow that practice, which has been labeled by one of those I’ve welcomed as “kindness.” I like that!

It is my sense that if we pay attention to community indicators, we can pay attention to and have stronger communities. Change starts with awareness. Indicators help us with awareness.

Now here comes the protective part. Are there ways in which we should NOT use (abuse) community indicators? Again, Shawn Callahan said it well:

but, please, please, please don’t turn them into management targets.

4 Comments:

Shawn Callahan said...: Great post Nancy. I have put a few ideas down here.; 4:34 PM
John Smith said...: Wouldn't repeated reminders, invitations, entreaties, cajoling, and light-hearted pressure be a community indicator? It may not be so visible from "the outside" but it's probably a pretty reliable indicator "from the inside". A little like the little trickle at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?

By repeatedly pointing to an interesting discussion on a blog using an alternative, old-fashioned medium like email, Nancy's reminders to me (I'm so far a non-blogger) are a good example of a community indicator. So expressed more generally:

When there is repeated pressure (that's gentle enough, makes sense enough, and is regarded as welcome) within a group of people to conform (or perhaps more interestingly) to experiment with something new, it's a (community) sign-of-life.; 5:28 PM
Melinda Casino said...: Thanks for this beginner's guide!; 6:39 PM
Deborah Elizabeth Finn said...: Dear Nancy:

First of all, have I ever told you that you rock the house? Well, you do!

Secondly, I'm a big fan of the Boston Indicators Project (http://www.bostonindicators.org), and I'd like to encourage you to kick its tires and maybe even blog about it.

Best regards from Deborah

Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog
http://public.xdi.org/=deborah.elizabeth.finn; 7:56 PM