Full Circle Associates

I have not had an IM with my friend Jim in too many weeks. When I'm online, he's not. So as a simulacrum of connection, I want to point to two recent posts that relate to my favorite topic, community. (Well, second favorite topic. Chocolate still rules!)

First - J. LeRoy's Evolving Web: Is It Community or a Buncha People Doing The Same Stuff at the Same Time? - Jim makes a point I agree with. "Communities need some permanence to have value." My take on that is that a community is a group of people with a shared interest who interact with each other over time.

I link to this because as community "gets hot" again, I get crazy when the word is tossed around with little real sense of what we are talking about. (When I say hot, here's an example. Three people contacted me in the last week looking for a full time community manager. Need I say more?)

Most of the things we are seeing are networks which have nodes of relationships within them. MySpace is not a single community. You Tube is not a single community. OK, enough of that rant.

The second post from Jim gets closer to the heart of community. In Creating Community to Survive Jim points to a story about performance artist Quique Aviles. Jim writes, "The message here is that community is key to healthy living. A community is where we store our social norms."

Go read the post.

That is what community is about!

Tags: community_indicators, community