Our first attempts at building community online have had both good and bad outcomes. We know them all. But would we have expected otherwise? We are new at digital communities and are inventing them as we move forward. Of course we aren’t going to get it right the first time. But the key question is whether these technologies help us form social bonds or not. Anyone who has posted a question in a forum and received an answer from a stranger knows firsthand that they bring us together.

Damanhur’s mock battles prevent the kind of burn-out you find when the most empathetic people in a community get tasked with dealing with the emotional needs of others, putting a lot a strain on the shoulders of a few.

The bottom line is that many intentional communities exist because of wealthy patrons and benefactors, and courting philanthropy and start-up capital is part of the job of charismatic founders.

she writes about her time cutting and baling hay, making butter, driving a tractor, cutting firewood, baking bread, and taking care of children, animals and the wellbeing of her peers.

When the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen established New Harmony in 1825, on 20,000 acres in Indiana, he attracted an enthusiastic following, gaining more than 800 members in just a little over six weeks.

the more relevant drivers that cause many communities to unravel sound more like the challenges afflicting any organisation today: capital constraints, burn-out, conflict over private property and resource management, poor systems of conflict mediation, factionalism, founder problems, reputation management, skills shortage, and failure to attract new talent or entice subsequent generations.

the irony is that many of the administrative and managerial forces that individuals are running away from within mainstream society are exactly the organisational tools that would make intentional communities more resilient:

attrition rates for intentional communities are not all that different from many other types of human endeavour.

Generally, intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than that of most start-ups. Only a handful of communities founded in the US during the 19th century’s ‘golden age of communities’ lasted beyond a century; most folded in a matter of months. This golden age birthed more than 100 experimental communities, with more than 100,000 members in total who, according to the historian Mark Holloway in Heavens on Earth (1951)

“If everyone did it the world would be a better place.”

these kinds of issues are systemic and intrinsic and maybe even foundational to intentional communities.

478 intentional communities since the 1820s have now shrunk to 112 worldwide in the last 30 years)

how do you how do you think about what that community looks like and how you communicate that because in many senses you could say obviously you're hoping to build utopia 00:09:30 not dystopia right but but utopia and dystopia are different things with different people right and you could start out on this journey with uh with everyone saying we're going 00:09:42 to go to here point point a and then actually they decide their life changes they have a family or whatever they want to go over here and they put a lot of time into this or and equally point a could actually end up not looking like what they want to to be 00:09:55 part of how are you managing that journey for the people as part of the path

I   grew up at Esalen and all these crazy new age-ey  sort of places, and I can tell you that I have   00:54:38 seen every flavor of self-help and personal  development that you could shake a stick at.   And none of them work. They all breed assholes.  I mean, I'm sorry, but if you're an asshole,   there's no way around it. Nothing's going to fix  you. And if you're not an asshole, then everything   is going to make you less of an asshole. So the reason that's important is that there's   00:55:02 a lot of pressure on how people should live, how  they should think, how they should be, how they   should feel. And this top-down instructional of  telling people how to live, think and feel is,   I think, a completely un-ecological process that  is interrupting the possibilities

I can tell you that   my experience is that intentional communities  are not only not fun, but a disaster.   00:51:53 And one of the reasons they're both not fun and  a disaster is that they have a mission statement.   They already know where they're going and there's  some abstracted map-like idea that everyone thinks   that they're cohering to. But then it turns  out that everyone actually interpreted that   differently and the way they interpreted it  yesterday changed. And so that thing becomes   00:52:16 the territory on which you are in polarity with  each other and not the thing that you agree about.   The thing you fight about most is the mission  statement.

At the same time, our whole sense of community has been lost as the requirement of modern societies rely on us living in anonymous neighbourhoods with people we don’t know or share much of anything in common. Who are these representatives presuming to represent anymore anyway?

It’s no wonder that fewer than half of citizens can be bothered to vote

What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. Perhaps more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.

They work, they go to the pub and while they share cooking duties they’re not against ordering a takeaway on a Friday night. ‘I would argue that quite often intentional communities reflect the period in which they were formed,’ explains Kirsten Stevens-Wood, a senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University and lead for the Intentional Communities Research Group.

Renewable Energy Communities as Modes of Collective Prosumership: A Multi-Disciplinary Assessment

"Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.

For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the oldart-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out ofnowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. Ibecame (and still am) more and more convinced that the importantchanges in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. Icall this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. This word isnow starting to gain some currency - the philosopher James Ogilvy uses itin his most recent book.

One interesting observation about these markets is that the upper-limit for value creation of individual ventures here, one creator, one community, etc, is smaller than startups. There are only a handful of trillion-dollar communities in the history of humanity, and no trillion-dollar influencers or entertainers. Scale will come more from breadth, not just making one good bet, as is the case in startups.

The next Y Combinator will identify an industry where most people are under-valuing a certain class of talent in an industry poised to grow rapidly, gather a community to commoditize tribal knowledge, and over time scale it into a self-sustaining flywheel that helps them grow their gravitational field. As for which industry, my guess is as good as anyone else’s – unpredictability is a core element of disruption, almost definitionally – but I think there’s a good chance it’ll come from one of these areas: The creator economy – people who can independently grow an audience and monetize them sustainably. Entertainment, as an old, bureaucratic industry adjacent to this space, is also an interesting target. Communities – I’ve written extensively about my bullishness on communities elsewhere. Higher education – what replaces Harvard and Stanford?

He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

User participation in any online internet community generally follows the 90-9-1 rule:90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don’t contribute9% of community members edit or respond to content but don’t create content of their own1% of community members create new content

a society-wide hyperconversation. This hyperconversation operationalizes continuous discourse, including its differentiation and emergent framing aspects. It aims to assist people in developing their own ways of framing and conceiving the problem that makes sense given their social, cultural, and environmental contexts. As depicted in table 1, the hyperconversation also reflects a slower, more deliberate approach to discourse; this acknowledges damaged democratic processes and fractured societal social cohesion. Its optimal design would require input from other relevant disciplines and expertise,

Measuring the health of an online community by librarian:libertarian ratio

Learning happens when a connection is made between these nodes;

PLE is the educational manifestation of the web’s “small pieces loosely joined,” a “world of pure connection, free of the arbitrary constraints of matter, distance, and time.”

PLNs (professional learning networks) and their role in supporting the development of  ‘connected educators’.

We’re building a knowledge base, so if one writer collects information for an article, their research is made available to the other writers in the collective. 

Companies should not assume they can release a product without thinking about its unintended uses and then undo the harm that results. This often doesn’t work.Some technology

I think this new identity should… build upon a diverse group of people and ideas remember, but not revere, past research and tradition welcome independent contributors, and view itself as a collective of people, not an industry of companies work in the open, and value building and testing ideas over spreading them.

Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries,

Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

I want a [[community]], not an [[audience]]. Audience is stuff like reach, personality/celebrity, spectacle, anxiety, alienation, competition. Community is more like voice, discussion, comradery.

address historical and ongoing injustice and imagine new ways of teaching, researching, and engaging with community

Smart leaders will not focus so much on exhorting people not to be afraid of change and will instead work to do everything they can to increase a sense of stable, supportive community. Unfortunately, many leaders see stability, community, and a sense of belonging as enemies of innovation — when in reality they are the prerequisites.

an ongoing, complex process of aligning resources, practices, and initiatives of multiple communities [20].

For someone who wants to extend the platform, particularly developers, my best advice would be to ignore the hype. For now things can still be built without all the fancy tools. The difference is that I think it is safe to say few getting into WordPress development will have the next big plugin or theme. What is more likely is that new developers in WordPress will have rewarding careers working for hosts and other larger, established companies in the space.

In 1996, technology historian Jennifer S. Light compared the talk of “cyberoptimists” about virtual communities to city planners’ earlier optimistic predictions about shopping malls. As the automobile colonized U.S. cities in the 1950s, planners promised that malls would be enclosed public spaces to replace Main Streets. But as Light pointed out, the transition to suburban malls brought new inequities of access and limited the space’s functions to those that served commercial interests.

Platforms of the Facebook walled-factory type are unsuited to thework of building community, whether globally or locally, becausesuch platforms are unresponsive to their users, and unresponsive bydesign (design that is driven by a desire to be universal in scope). Itis virtually impossible to contact anyone at Google, Facebook,Twitter, or Instagram, and that is so that those platforms can trainus to do what they want us to do, rather than be accountable to ourdesires and needs

“Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”

According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.”

IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”

A corporation is not a community. It does not serve a community.

Americans worked together: “As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite.”

Famously, he found many of the answers in state, local, and even neighborhood institutions. He wrote approvingly of American federalism, which “permits the Union to enjoy the power of a great republic and the security of a small one.” He liked the traditions of local democracy too, the “township institutions” that “give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” Despite the vast empty spaces of their country, Americans met one another, made decisions together, carried out projects together. Americans were good at democracy because they practiced democracy. They formed what he called “associations,” the myriad organizations that we now call “civil society,” and they did so everywhere:Not only do [Americans] have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools … Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS).

It turns out it’s really difficult to get people to rebel against something if they can’t see it, don’t feel empowered to make choices about, and don’t really understand it.

One of the biggest challenges is a very human one – how do we get everyone to work with their camera switched on.

the community is both endlessly creative and genuinely interested in solving big issues in meaningful ways. Whether it's their commitment to careful (and caring) community stewardship or their particular strain of techno-ethics, I have been consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at what I've seen during the last twelve months. I don't always see eye-to-eye with their decisions and I don't think that the community is perfect, but it's consistently (and deliberately) striving to be better, and that's a fairly rare thing, online or off.

Because annotating a syllabus conveys a message–from day one–that course documents are not static artifacts, that something authored by an instructor is not unwelcoming of feedback, and that student voice is both appreciated and necessary for a shared endeavor.

Annotate Your Syllabus 3.0

These days I find myself away from broadcast tools and more in the insular channels of my friend groups. What I want from technology is to share life with my friends; to be given the opportunity, and the power, to share that life, and all it includes… showing them care, or sharing the bits of knowledge that seem important to us as a group.

Identity is always about groups, and group formation is always about identity formation, and both are processes of learning.

I take my own definition of the word “community” from educational theorists Etienne and Beverly Wenger: “communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” I like this definition because it is so broad while capturing a really specific truth about groups.

Because the mainstream social networks have been designed by a tiny number of people, we have been prevented from experimenting and creating new knowledge about what sustainable community management online looks like. Start erasing the line between operators, customers, and community members and squint; you begin make out the shape of a group of people who can build for themselves and determine their own path of development.

What does “community” mean? Facebook calls its billions of users a community, and multinational brands use this word to refer to their customers. Are these communities in any meaningful sense? What about the “brand communities” I mentioned earlier, do these qualify? And can a community that is paid truly be called a community at all? As paid communities become more prominent, I expect to see these questions asked more frequently and urgently. Marketers, venture capitalists, and business writers will answer from one perspective, offering up ways to monetize large swaths of people. Journalists and critics will reply with a different perspective, decrying organizations for extracting value from relationships. And I imagine we will hear the voice of communities themselves, defending just who they are from both sides.

Education and practitioner networks We’re seeing a lot of new venture funded education communities, but here once more is a reason to be more excited about bottom-up community-driven businesses. What happens when groups of independent teachers or consultants who are already chatting have shared interfaces to formalize, quote, and invoice? In the past, guilds have provided excellent education opportunities, and they can again.

Among other social apps, Bloomberg Terminal features a Bloomberg Hacker News clone, a Bloomberg Craigslist clone, Bloomberg instant messaging, and Bloomberg-restricted email. From this perspective it is possible to view Bloomberg as a company that offers a full-stack set of social environments, news, and tooling for a distinct community with specific needs: financial workers. While Bloomberg shows what is possible when the community in question already works with large amounts of capital, its lessons are applicable to niche content providers. .. Bloomberg is an example of the classic Web 2.0 business maxim “come for the tool, stay for the network.”

Bespoke Social Media

These new paid communities largely live on invite-only Telegrams, Slacks, Discords, and Facebook groups, raising the question: could there be applications more suitable to these networks? Indeed, the growing popularity of paid communities has been noticed by a bunch of new venture-funded companies such as such as Genevachat, Mighty Networks, and Circle, all of which want to become “the platform for communities.”

Finally, commerce and social are coming together, although to much less a degree than marketing teams who talk up “brand communities” would like you to think. In all but a few cases, “community” here is just the marketing language used to describe a microbrand’s niche Instagram fandom.

A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.

As high quality content and effective brand strategy move down the long tail, “community” has become an important concept for every post-Web 2.0 player. Crypto token holders, influencer fanbases, DTC brand customers, creator audiences, and new social networks are all often referred to as communities, and each has a stake in developing community for itself.

Whoever controls the third place controls the community. If the third place is a building, and they decide to renovate, tough luck. It's being renovated. The third place is where the community lives, it's where they go by default essentially. If you own that place, you own a considerable amount of power in the community.

TINA: I hope you've read her book, The Art of Gathering. That book will change your life. You will never look at any gathering, be it family or business, the same way again. Priya talks about being intentional with your gatherings, paying attention to how you “open the container and close it,” how to guide your guests. You, the host, are setting the tone of your gathering. 

Why do we not have more women or diversity participating in policy making?

The current intellectual sphere (centered on Twitter) makes interaction even easier. Its cost is an eroding sense of community.

TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATIONTHROUGH PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITY

Understanding and respecting community behaviors when expressing opinions in online discussions.