THE LAB

By Regan Kohlhardt

Re-Vision Labs Fellow

Just in time to whip up for your Christmas dinner this week, here are the last four ingredients for our delicious, home-made pot of Community! See last week’s post for the first four.

Ingredient #5 Governance

Communities need leadership. I read an interesting blog post a while back that touched on this particular topic, and I thought the author had a good point about community leaders self-selecting themselves. Here is what she had to say:

Community leaders emerge over time as they continue to take proactive roles in the community and rally other members to their causes. These leaders are community members and they self-select because of their interests – not because they are told to do so…although they can be encouraged to do so.

To read the whole post which also has some interesting insight on essential elements of community, see “Social Media is Not Community,” The Social Organization.

Governance helps support a community’s common goal or interest. Community leaders take the community’s conversations, ideas, and aspirations and consolidate them into some sort of holistic plan for the community. They facilitate cooperation among the members and serve as examples in their fervor for the community goal. They provide the reliability and stability needed to keep a community thriving.

An interesting development to note with regard to community Governance, is the increased member participation in leadership decision-making that social media and the internet have incorporated into modern communities. The voices and thoughts of community members have always been respected by community leaders, but with social media and the internet, participants have a much larger and louder voice.

Check out the White House’s movement towards open government as well as the City of Seattle’s movement towards open government for examples of members of the national and state-level communities having a voice in the ‘grand plan’ of their communities.

Ingredient #6 Networking

Our next tasty ingredient to add to our Community dish is: Networking

Communities cannot exist in isolation. They would die off if that were the case. Instead, prospering and growing communities are those that deliberately work to network and bring in a constant flow of new community members and support.

Networking also allows communities to form alliances with other communities to pursue a common goal. Two heads are better than one, right? Multiple communities working together towards one goal are logically better than multiple communities working separately.

This is actually a problem we see a lot in development work around the world. Multiple organizations will work to achieve similar goals (say improving maternal health care), but they don’t always work together. Why not? Any body else have thoughts on this?

As with community Governance, community Networking is also something that has been dramatically affected by social media and the internet. There’s a video which has run rampant on Youtube called Did You Know that says it takes only 2 years to reach a market audience of 50 million using Facebook. That’s compared to 38 years using the radio. Communities have fully taken advantage ofsocial media and the web to increase their outreach efforts to more people than they ever could have reached before the internet.

Ingredient #7 and #8 Design and Story

And here we have the last two ingredients for our Community recipe: Design and Story.

Design and Story help to give communities an identity, a soul if you will, to display to both its members and the rest of the world. They help communicate and outline the mission and goal behind every community.

Thinking about Design specifically, a community, whether it manifests itself on a webpage, on an online forum, in a physical gathering place, or just as an idea, needs some sort of ‘designed’ appeal. Playing on the whole recipe analogy, any recipe that produces awesome-tasting food is great, but if it looks like crap (to be explicit), nobody’s going to want to eat it. The same goes for community.

Obviously for online forums and webpages, Design is in the appearance of the page, in the way it communicates the mission statement of the community and in the ease with which community members can voice their thoughts and partake in the discussion.

With physical spaces, you could say its the feng shui of the space. Does it look like a kind of space that can accurately represent the community it accommodates?

Lastly, with ideas, are these ideas ordered and meaningful? Is there Design behind them or are they just a random shmattering of thoughts? This is basic common sense. How can you gather a group of people without properly communicating your ideas?

Story really gives community a personal aspect, something that people can hang onto and take to the heart. Tales that delineate the creation of a community, the trials and tribulations of a community, and the triumphs of community can communicate to the fullest extent what that community is all about. Stories lay bare the character of community, and this in turn, attracts people to it. They formulate trust, bonds, and ‘me-too!’ experiences that pull in individuals far more securely than mere facts ever could.

People like character, and they prize individuality. Design and Story bring the character and individuality of a community to the front. More importantly, they speak to the raw emotions we have as humans and successfully court our loyalties.

Remember hearing this fable when you were little? Now that is a tale of cooking up community if I ever heard of one...

Simmer over Medium Heat and Serve Hot!

There we have it! The 8 Essential Ingredients for a hot pot of Community: Commons, Ecology, Food, Economy, Governance, Networks, Design, and Story.

I would appreciate any comments from all of you readers on these 8 Ingredients. Community can be a tricky potion to concoct because it does establish itself in so many unique and different ways. Are these 8 Ingredients absolutely essential? Are some more important that others? Are there some additional additives that would make this recipe even more enticing?

Let me know your thoughts and good luck with the cooking!

Similar Posts:

• Cooking Up Community: Part 1
• Authentic Community Engagement: Key to the Future
• Weekly Hot Hits in Global Development 12/14-12/18!