Cooking Up Community: Part 1
By Regan Kohlhardt
Re-Vision Labs Fellow
One of my favorite concoctions to mix up this time of year when the weather has just gone from cool to cold and when Christmas is right around the corner is a delicious, steaming, creamy pot of Community. Hmmm. Tasty stuff.
The key to pulling a good batch of community together is to make sure you get the ingredients right. You can always tamper a little bit with the amount of each ingredient you put in, sometimes you can even throw in a little something extra – sprinkles, for example, can be quite good – but it’s important to get the basics right.
The recipe that you’re about to read is one I snagged directly from the Founding Partners of Re-Vision Labs. They are, after all, master chefs at cooking up community. They should know what goes in the pot!
So with no further ado (because I know there’s some hungry community eaters out there), we’ll start with the first four Essential Ingredients for Community and why they’re important for best batch of Community ever cooked up. Next week, we’ll address the last four.
Ingredient #1: Commons
In days of old, Place was used instead of Commons. This being because, traditionally, community was thought of as being associated with a specific geographic location. Place used to be the initial, first ingredient in making Community.
Obviously, recipes evolve, and usually for the better. Our recipe for Community has evolved to call for Commons now instead of Place, an improved modification in my opinion.
Commons is important to Community because it provides a gathering point for people to be drawn to. It can be anything from a physical building, a ski hill, or a sacred site to an online forum or Facebook Fan Page. It could even be an idea, something that has no physical bearing at all. The important part is that the Commons must be accessible to all community members, something that they can share with one another as equals.
Ideally, the Commons should be a pleasant place for the community members to gather. Logically, if it’s a nice place, or a well-designed forum, or a well-thought out idea, it will be more appealing to community members.
More importantly, Commons should have character. Commons that can’t be differentiated one from the next will not produce the perfect Community. They should have some element that separates them from other Commons and makes them stand out.
Ingredient #2 Ecology
Ecology goes very much hand-in-hand with the Commons. Ecology, defined by Google, is “the environment as it relates to living organisms.” A Commons without living organisms would be a very bland Commons indeed. So we add Ecology (which includes living organism), and we should get a complex reaction: the organisms will interact with one another and their Commons effectively giving us Ecology.
Ecology is an integral part to our batch of Community for many of the same reasons that Commons is important. If people, assuming those are the living organisms we add to our mix, do not interact with their commons or with each other, Community will most definitely NOT be the end of the result.
Community takes collaboration, interaction, and communication to taste properly like Community. Ecology gives us this.
One common mistake people make is to forget that Ecology does include ALL living organism, not just people. It should therefore be noted, that a properly made Community is one which manifests healthy relationships between people and other living organisms occupying the same commons like plants or animals.
A good model to demonstrate the necessity of a healthy Ecology for a robust Community is Garret Hardin’s infamous Tragedy of the Commons Model.
Say our Commons was a nice, grassy field, and that a community of herders and cattle lived around that Commons. It is in every individual herder’s individual interest to put as many cattle as possible on that little parcel of land, but if each herder does this, then the Commons will eventually be degraded and become utterly useless to all (check out Wikipedia for a longer overview of Tragedy of the Commons).
If one man has to sacrifice his own profit for the good of the group, he won't do it!
Incorporating a healthy Ecology into our batch of Community means that this would not happen. Presumably, the members of the Community are interested in preserving their Commons, so they will not act out of self interest and destroy what has brought them together in the first place. Ultimately, poor Ecology results in a destroyed Commons which in turn results in a destroyed, and foul-tasting, foul-smelling Community.
Ingredient #3 Food (Optional, but recommended!)
Ah yes, well, Food is usually an important ingredient to any recipe. It’s also incredibly important for Community! Food brings people together like nothing else does in the world.
However, just like with our Commons and Ecology ingredients, if you have sub-par Food for your community, you will have a sub-par community. I’m sorry, but Community just doesn’t come with your Happy Meal; it comes served on a real plate in a real, family-owned restaurant, serving real, local food.
As noted above, Food is not a required ingredient though it is highly recommended. There are numerous Online Communities that don’t incorporate the element of Food in their ingredient list, yet they still have well-made communities.
Ingredient #4 Economy
All Communities need some sort of Economy to survive. Money does make the world go round after all. The key with Community Economies is that the focus is not just on making money. The one-shot track for making money brings Hardin’s Tragedy model back to mind and does nothing more for our Community medley than undermine our very first ingredient: the Commons.
A Community Economy is an economy which seeks to keep funds within the community, to give back to the community, and to help it grow. This means that individuals will not alway come out on top in terms of monetary resources. Shopping locally often means paying more for your goods. However, shopping locally also means that a positive externality is produced in the form of a well maintained, well-put-together community! So in a sense, people aren’t just paying for their goods, they’re paying to support and maintain their Commons and promote a healthy Ecological balance.
To Be Continued….
We currently have mixed together Commons, Ecology, Food, and Economy. Each of these elements plays an integral role in making a Community attractive to community members, much like a tasty treat is attractive to hungry children. All that’s left to add are: Governance, Design, Networks, and Story. Check back next week for the grand finale of the recipe!
