THE LAB

Re-Vision Labs is in the business of building community, but what, exactly, is community?

If you ask Google to ‘define: community’, your first hit is this: “A group of people living in a particular local area.”

Hmm, well lots of people live in lots of particular local areas and they don’t always have what we call community…or maybe they do? Sometimes it seems like there are multiple communities in one given area.

And what about people that don’t live in a particular area together and still consider themselves part of a community? Take online community for example. These people don’t live anywhere near each other. They can be half across the world from one another and still think they share something in common with the other members of their community …

Maybe that’s it then!

A community is a group of people who share something in common! And it doesn’t have to be the same piece of geographical turf, it could be anything! ……Or could it?

Here’s what Wikipedia – arguably the result of one of the most extensive online communities in existence – has to say about the word:

“In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.
In sociology, the concept of community has caused infinite debate, and sociologists are yet to reach agreement on a definition of the term….”

Uh oh – If the sociologists still can’t agree on what community means, how are we plebeian-folk supposed to figure out what it is?!

Seriously, what is community? And what does it really mean to us today in our daily lives, in our work lives, in our online lives, in our world at large? From small niche communities like the Live Action Role Playing people that romp around in city parks and forests in knight’s armor and princess dresses with swords and shields to what is often referred to as the ‘global community’, what does community mean? Why do people inevitably engage in community?

LARPers a'LARPing

Right, well here’s to a brand new series of RVL blog entries dedicated entirely to exploring these exact questions. What is community? How does a community start up in the first place? How is it already manifested in our globally integrated, technologically-inundated society? Why do some communities fail while others thrive? And above all, why do we as a human race need and covet community; What does it do for us?

Obviously, this is a pretty deep question, and I have no intention of addressing it in its entirety in this first entry or even in the first dozen or so entries. It is my preference to explore the concept of community, in all of its complexity, piece by piece, story by story, and conversation by conversation.

So I’ll end here, for now, with a question for all of you readers and an invitation to be part of the conversation:

“What does community mean to you?”

In the arrogance of my youth, I frequently dismissed sociology as a lesser academic discipline. My friends and I derided those who enrolled in sociology classes as wimps, taking the “easy courses.” We guessed they were too intellectually lazy to tackle the “hard sciences” or “more rigorous” liberal arts like philosophy, literature and languages.

Oops.

Little did I suspect that, years later, I would be immersed in a torrent of world-changing technologies that are driven, fundamentally, by social collaboration. It is the most exciting time of my life, and I believe that we are witnessing a pivotal moment in human history.

The big questions in business, and in all large enterprises for that matter, now look something like this:

• How do groups align and communicate?
• What are the interpersonal dynamics of open-source organizations?
• What are the social factors in cooperative competition?
• What is the role of transparency in motivation?

The game has changed. I now have a growing appreciation for the collective wisdom on human behavior, and for those who have dedicated their careers to its study. With profound apologies to all the sociology majors… you rock!