How Some Folks Have Tried to Describe Community

Map Branches

• From the website of the Foundation for Community Encouragement
  • "A community is a group of two or more people who have been able to accept and transcend their differences regardless of the diversity of their backgrounds (social, spiritual, educational, ethnic, economic, political, etc.). This enables them to communi
• ([Jones, 1995b]; [McLaughlin et al. 1995])
  • The term virtual community is still a problematic scientific concept
• Wally Bock
  • "Communities are characterized by three things: common interests, frequent interaction, and identification."
• Howard Rheingold
  • "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace."
• Cliff Figallo
  • "connection"
  • "feeling part of a larger social whole"
  • "an exchange...of commonly valued things,"
  • "relationships...that last through time creating shared histories."
• Luciano Paccagnella of the University of Milan
  • "Virtual communities has lately become a fashionable term which will be used here as a useful metaphor to indicate the articulated pattern of relationships, roles, norms, institutions, and languages developed on-line"
• Joseph Cothrel and Ruth Williams
  • "a group of people who use computer networks as their primary mode of interaction."
  • "a sense of commonality: common interests; purpose; or objectives"
  • "the social element was critical to distinguishing a community from a mere group of individuals."
• A federal judge at a FCC workshop said
  • "Community is like pornography, I don't know how to define it, but I sure know it when I see it."
• M. Scott Peck
  • "a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together," and to "delight
• Learnativity
  • Communities help generate a shared language, rituals and customers, and collective memory of those that join the group."
  • the term community suggests a general sense of altruism, reciprocity, and beneficence that comes from working together.
  • "In the physical world, communities are typically groups of people (a town, for instance) held together by some common identity or interest. The same holds true for virtual or online communities in that they, too, are comprised of people with shared ide
• Hagel and Armstrong
  • there are five elements that define community
    • a commercial orientation
    • an openness to competitive information/access
    • a valuing of member generated content,
    • integration of content and communications
    • distinctive focus
• Jake
  • "A group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons."
  • "People often think that blogs, forums, wikis, and other tools are community. In actuality, those tools are just that - tools. They can help you to build community, but they aren't actually "community".
• "Towntalk," a listserv
  • It has, or has the potential to develop, a strong commercial element..."
  • It provides services to community members, ... that meet community member needs;
  • It has a single defining focus; ... (that) gives them a reason to return;
  • It is designed to attract and retain community members who become more than superficially involved in community events ... and ... are able to make new friends through the community;
  • It is interactive and built on the concept of many-to-many communications
• M. Scott Peck
  • "When we talk about communities at FE we are not referring to any aggregate of people, but to the quality of communication among them,"
• Mihaela Moussou
  • "supportive of all its members, accepts individual styles and fills in gaps when/where needed in order to sustain itself and for the good of the whole."
• Barry Wellman (2001)
  • "networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity."

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