Who is a Community?

Absolute and Relative Identity

For those of us wishing to protect our privacy upon the open circuits that so dominate the Internet, absolute identity is not a choice. We prefer relative identity.

The basic doctrine of relative identity states that - All I need to know about you is that you are not me! And visa versa.

Relative identity works fine for two people. But what do you do when it's time to expand? If three people are to identify themselves relatively there is an immediate problem. A and B both know that they are not the other but neither knows that C is not the other.

Absolute identity is only as credible as the other absolute identities that are associated with it. In other words, I am suppose to believe your absolute identity because it is confirmed by another supposed absolute identity. Of course, I only need to continue tracing the line back and we will find that the genealogy is not rooted in an absolute identity. It must be rooted in the first pair who recognized the relative identity of each. The one looked at the other and thought "You are not me." And that was a very correct judgement.

Relative identity allows users the freedom to be whoever they want to be, enabling them to use any mode that they want to use, including the expository, narrative and dramatic modes.

Michael Welsh video 56:00

What is a Community?
When is a Community?
Why is a Community?
Where is a Community?
How is a Community?

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Join the Discussion Workshop

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This blog on Facilitating Online Discussions is an open circuit introduction to our subject matter. If you are interested in applying democratic forms to community organization, you may register for our closed circuit Discussion Workshop meetings. Expect lots of experimenting with communication and leadership techniques as we build small groups into a unified community.

What's the Discussion Workshop?

In the workshops we meet for short one hour meetings and apply ourselves to learning ordinal forms together. The Discussion Workshop is where we apply all of the ideas and principles that you have read about in the Facilitating Online Communities blog.

We engage in practical dialogue while thoroughly learning the technical and ethical aspects of a given platform.

The Workshop exhibits all of the traditional attributes of a group. Groups are associated into one community through a constitution. Meetings are organized and presented by the members.

A practical workshop

Apply for membership and acquire all of these benefits:

Access to a wide variety of training programs in practical democratic arts.

Attend the weekly business meeting where your voice is heard and you have a right to vote and have your vote counted correctly in relation to a whole number which is the membership.

Serve as an elected officer.

Coordinate workshops.

Simplest way to understand is to think about how you use the telephone and google chat or yahoo or AIM chat. Does everyone talk at the same time? No. You take turns, whether it's 2 people or 20, you take turns.

"Majority rules" is not the foundation for democratic society. In fact, many routine decisions can be made by a majority of a quorum. If a quorum is 50% of the membership then 5 is a quorum of a membership of 10. 3 is a majority of the quorum. Therefore the routine decisions are made by 3 of the 10 members. While minority rules in small matters, it is desirable to have a majority or supermajority in matters of greater weight.

Our organizing principle will not be topical but temporal and ordinal. So accept that we will be topically disorganized until we establish the temporal and ordinal features of our forums. Ultimately, the membership will be responsible for topical organization.

Since I believe that the personal privacy of individual members is more important than the security of the adm or the posts, I have opted for restricting the activities of the adm. That's how I arrived at the above formula. I want to set up forums that are rooted in equality.

We are going to use a large number of forums and boards that are each set differently to achieve a certain texture or democratic principle.

Member administered programs

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October evaluation notes

Seemed to be educators who are looking for online credentials by taking these courses. Yet they don't deserve the credential for this "course" because they didn't do the work for it and the "course" itself is not up to standards. The course must have credibility first.

These seem to be the type that are looking to promote themselves into a better job or career. They buy and promote books like "How to Organize without Organization" because they want to get connected and break into the market with their own theory.

Leigh stated at the start of this "course" that the platform is not what makes the community.
I agree. I think that Leigh should have met with the FOC08 people rather than admit whoever showed up on a given platform to be called "FOC members".

A course is a small group that meets continuously through a complete term. Leigh had only five hours a week for this course. That is hardly enough time for a very small group of seven to ten members.

Facilitating Online Communities is a set of human problems and solutions. Since platforms are not the community, I think that the course outline should not have included exploration of all of these platforms. Rather we should have taken one or two very common platforms and explored the ethical uses of them.

In a course, the participants are responsible to respond. I would expect higher standards for replying to the blogging. Sustained dialogue should have been a requirement. When I take a university level course or workshop, there is a very high degree of exchange. I didn't get that here, either on my own blog or on the blogs of the other participants. The blogging assignment should have included that each reply some number of times on each blog assignment. Maybe ten replies for each blog. That would not have been much to do for a group two or three people.

Leigh, I really think that you need to learn to organize two or three people in one of these courses. Organize them as a group and deliver this like a course. With such a small group, you could even do the assignments too. I think the fact that Leigh was not doing the assignments was what led him off track. In a teaching role, I would not expect the leader of the group to do the assignments but perhaps as a facilitator you should have? Doing the assignments would have kept you in touch. You somehow got out of touch with those who are blogging on the topic of Faciliatating Online Communities. Instead you got all touchy feely with whoever met on whatever platform of the week you had scheduled.

Platforms have little to do with the arts of facilitating groups.

I wonder if politics is not involved somehow? Leigh was running for an elected office at the same time as this course. I wonder if the course was not just a way of promoting the Leigh's name during the election? I wonder if Leigh allowed the course to be overrun by th WE community because they were the voters in the WE election? This led him to refusing to identify who was a member of the group and focus the five hours per week on those few.

Anyway, I'm a dissatisfied customer and think that this "course" degrades the reputation of the "university" that sponsored it.

steered discussion away fron ethical to technical
immature approach to human problems
problems created by technology
stoopid to expect technology to solve these problems

if you want "out-of-the-box" experience go trolling

need to demonstrate ethical democratic forms so people can learn them
urgent when country is going socialist and politicians are moving to suspend form

other important uses:
who makes rules for Internet?
Missouri state legislature?
City Council of Santa Barbara?
or the users themselves?

individuals have abdicated decision making to administrators because groups lack organized temporal and ordinal forms
great benefit in restoring form is that people can build their communities up through their own decision making efforts
rational discussion deliberation and decision making cannot be made with irrational forms or outside of rational form

open community closed groups

need open circuit for promotion, to let people know you exist, advertising
closed circuits should be used in organizing small groups, there is no reason to broadcast the proceedings of a small group, Rotary International does not need to know all of the goings on of every local club in the world.

disservice to expect people to be able to wade through mountains voluminous of info to find their way
how can someone know what to ask for?
how can they know that they don't know something unless someone shows them that the thing exists?
small group can verify what people know and don't know, this disclosing of blind spots is important for every member.
a practical dialogue gathers all the knowledge and increases the knowledge of each because it illuminates the blind areas the places where we don't even know that we don't know.

I expected that we would have as much exchange as a course with 10 or 15 people meeting once or twice a week should have.
Fewer people would have been easier to schedule more often
response ratio is affected by random multimemberships
people are not there to respond because they are too busy with their multi-"memberships", they go multi-membershipping because they do not recieve enough response in the "communities"
what seems to be lacking is the small cohesive group
ordinal form requires that each respond

blogging experience
first step in building groups is to find qualified individuals
dialogue can serve well and blogs are a good place to dialogue
still I find little interest in dialogue on many blogs
my role seems to be just to let people know that they exsist
finding people using blog search is easier also better faster way to connect less static

leigh said was not community
but treated it as if it were
my guess is that he is a part of a community
WE
and they were automatically qualified to participate
but it degraded the integrity of the course to act so
influenced by election?

gender politics maybe best to give gender neutral usernames?

relation of group to community

community is comprised of small individual groups
individual enters community through frequect contact with the small group
NOT through frequent contact with the whole community
the whole numvber of a group should be small enough so that the average member can lead it
Supreme Court is good example.
9 members
any one of them could lead it
community should not threaten the functioning of the group
but support it
groups should have seperate identities within the community

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My Rights and Responsibilities in Groups

Right to speak

Right to hear and be heard

Responsibility to respond

Responsibility to listen

Right to Privacy do not need to reveal one iota of personal info on an open circuit. The right to privacy includes the right to anonymity. The practice of banning users is unethical because it utilizes IP checking. New users are having their privacy invaded. IP checking is a threat to the security and privacy of the individual members.

Right to Equality begins with being able to count the membership as a whole number allowing relative quanities like equality, majority and minority to be accurately measured. The right to equality includes the right to discuss, deliberate and decide using traditional rational forms.

Freedom of Speech includes the right to communicate using all modes; expository, narrative and dramatic.

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Finding a Buddy

I want to begin writing a project outline for a discussion series to be administered by the community called Discussion Workshop. The concept is that all information should be imparted through discussion form and experience, rather than FAQ's and links only. It follows that the first project is Finding a Buddy. So I would like to discuss with a buddy about how to find a buddy.

So there are a few people I have connected with a bit here, but what is a buddy? I think of a buddy as someone who is dependable, someone I have a sustained relationship through a series of conversations. A buddy is someone who shares at least some of your own values with you. Like Joy and I share some of the same ideas.

What else? Maybe someone who appreciates your style of communication?

How to go about finding a buddy? I don't know if you can actually find one. All of my buddies have just come along in life. Still, I do think it helps to actively look for people because it increases the chances of finding quality people. In the Discussion Workshop, I would like to see the community acticvely pursuing the "Buddy System" as Derek calls it. I can see it as an assigned project to find a buddy and even having an elected official like a Master Host who develops a Buddy Program.*

Once every person has a buddy, I can see people imparting the needed information about technical aspects of platforms and the forms of discussion that can make a coherant community.

I would like to go through a complete series of discussions like we have done in this foc08 course. Each disculd focus upon an activity to experience together.

Basic Module 10 projects (choose from options)
Finding a Buddy
Choosing a Platform
Clocks and Time
Arranging Appointments
Chat through a Window
Practical Dialogue
On the Same Page
Alternate Posting
Choosing a Topic
Quoting the OP
Your First Circle
Evaluate a Discussion

By the end of this module, we will have formulated a small democratically organized group. I would like to constitute the groups and bring them to about 20 members then some of the original nucleus will organize to start a separate group with the same constitution. This allows each person to be a measurable part of a whole group that is possible to listen to. We might even call it "The Listeners Club".

*I am not saying that there is a prescription for finding a buddy, as I know from my own experience that buddies come along out of nowhere. But on further consideration, maybe they don't. I have to experiment with many different people to "stumble" upon one.

>My Take on Facilitation

I want to help people to learn through self-teaching dialogue how a community may facilitate itself through proper applications of traditional democratic arts and skills.

Learning Ordinal Forms

I'm thinking about my early learning of ordinal forms and smile at the memories of playing with the other neighborhood kids as a child. We all learned ordinal form together from the older kids in games that we played. We would each put one foot into a circle formation. Then an appointed counter would touch each toe counting arond the circle of shoes or barefeet saying,

"Eenie meenie miney moe

catch a monkey by the toe,

if he hollars let him go

my mother said to count to ten
1 -2 -3 - 4 - 5 -6 -7 -8 -9 -10"

That was our early training in democratic form. A kind of lottery with luck to choose the order for the game. It also cued us that there was such a thing as ordinal form, which served as a foundation for all of the games that we played. The most important issues in playing these games were of order and position. Who is first? And who is "It". Tagging someone and calling "It!" was an official cue for a running game. "It" had to run after you, following where ever you led, catch up to you, tag you and call "It!" This cue reversed the position and order. This was our first experience with the democratic principle of "taking turns" or what we adults call - roles.


Now that I look back on those early experiences with ordinal form, I realize that democratic procedure is only role playing in the expository mode.


I'm wondering how to get people involved practicing democratic procedures in the form of games. I am not interested in push button democracy, so no computerized games. Democracy is a human endeavor. To computerize it is to trivialize it.

democracy games put hand on bat next hand up to the knob of the handle last one grips the knob wins
lottery everyone launch a post at a given minute first or last to get a post stamp within that minute wins gets to post next OP or lead Evaluation Team
open circuit games spamming games for kids most active spammer wins

Connectivity

serendipity good for individual growth but not community it's anti community

My Take on Facilitation

I want to help people to learn through self-teaching dialogue how a community may facilitate itself through proper applications of traditional democratic arts and skills.

Next:Measured Discourse
Also See:People Need Training

FOC, Course or Community?

I was very careful about beginning this course. I came in on the day that it sterted and figured that was too late. Also there were over 100 "members" signed up. I thought that the number was way too many. I was going to suggest to Leigh that I wait for the next course out of respect for those people who had already begun. I also was going to suggest a much smaller group for the next FOC, if there was one.

Then as I began reading along with the course, I noticed that a huge percentage didn't follow through, so I signed up with a dedicated FOC08 blog becuase I thought I could meet the commitments.

To facilitate or to teach
"But I have been asked to facilitate a learning community"
What community? I thought that this was a course?
For me the FOC community is the course. This is what brought my attention to the community. I call it a community because those who were in FOC07 are still here. I am glad that they are here and seem to be establishing a community but it would help me straighten out my tremendous confusion by marking with some distinction the roles of FOC07 and FOC08.

I know what I am. I am FOC08. I have an FOC08 blog and it connects to every other blog. The course outline is in my sidebar and my post either complete the assignment requirements or are preparatory work for future assignments or are concerning web community organization.

I am FOC08. What I want to know is who qualifies for the FOC08 group with me? I don't think that it is fair to allow anyone else to traipse in here with any kind of equal voice just by setting up a blog. This is a whole course and I want to finish it with committed people. I want to trim my blogroll down to those who are fellow FOC08.

The other question is the FOC07 people. What role do they play? My feeling is that if they are not on this course with me, then they should be developing an advanced course that supports this one. They should organize to participate in whatever projects FOC08 brings in and help evaluate them according to objective criteria the FOC08 establishes for each project. If they can do this then they are part of FOC08. If not, then they are still a part of our community but should not be in the course because it only adds to the confusion.

I also want to have a closed circuit just for those members who are on either course with no more people traipsing in. As a member of FOC08, I think I have a right to the best conditions. Just as in a university course, we need a decent room, with comfortable seating, lighting and ventilation. We also would need a door so that we could conduct our work undisturbed. I require the proper conditions to continue.

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Traditional Community

How did traditional communities like Rotary International manage to grow their memberships to where there are more than 32,000 clubs and over 1.2 million members world-wide? They put the web community to shame!

They did it locally, building small groups one by one. The web has plenty of small groups but no system for self-propagating them.

History of Rotary International

The world's first service club, the Rotary Club of Chicago, was formed on 23 February 1905 by Paul P. Harris, an attorney who wished to capture in a professional club the same friendly spirit he had felt in the small towns of his youth. The Rotary name derived from the early practice of rotating meetings among members' offices.

Rotary's popularity spread, and within a decade, clubs were chartered from San Francisco to New York to Winnipeg, Canada. By 1921, Rotary clubs had been formed on six continents. The organization adopted the Rotary International name a year later.

As Rotary grew, its mission expanded beyond serving club members’ professional and social interests. Rotarians began pooling their resources and contributing their talents to help serve communities in need. The organization's dedication to this ideal is best expressed in its motto: Service Above Self.

By 1925, Rotary had grown to 200 clubs with more than 20,000 members. The organization's distinguished reputation attracted presidents, prime ministers, and a host of other luminaries to its ranks — among them author Thomas Mann, diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, and composer Jean Sibelius.

Latitudes and Longitudes

Each quadrant equals 30°

A given latitude at the equator extends from 0° to 180° (either W or E) with two posters on both ends. A given longitude (0°) equal to the latitude and extending from one pole to the other with two poster at both ends. The conscious day begins for all four with the two posters on the latitude exchanging posts between each other and the two posters on the longitude exchanging posts. What is the relative frequency of the posting cycles on each line?

I say that given any two longitudes and latitudes of equal length (or arc), with two posters posting between themselves from the extremes, that the two posters on the longitude will have a higher frequency of post exchanges between them throughout a conscious day.

On the map, place two posters at the extremes of a longitudinal area. Place one poster at the tip of Cape Horn, South America and the other poster in New Brunswick, Canada. Place two other posters at the extremes of a latitude equal to the length of the said longitude, one at London, UK and the other in Irkutsk, Russia. All other factors being equal (purpose, interest, speed of connection, etc.) the two on the longitude will have a higher frequency of exchanges than those on the latitude.

Let's form two groups of equal numbers and spaced evenly apart from one end to the other, one group on the longitude and the other on the latitude. The group on the longitude will have more opportunities for exchanges and will have more options to organize temporally and ordinally with greater facility than the group on the latitude.

What is the "comfort zone" of any one poster? If I live in one time zone, the further away another poster is from that zone, the more inconvenient it is to meet together. I guess that, of the 360º on the globe, the comfort zone is just about 180º (90º on either side of the longitude I reside upon). The window begins closing then.

120º allows a greater window of opportunity for meetings. I can divide the 360º of the entire globe into three zones of 120º each, and I will call them:

The Americas

Europe, Middle East and Africa

Far East and South Pacific

The geographical distribution is incidental because anyone sharing the same conscious day with a zone is qualified for membership in a group in that zone.

In this blog, I am treating time as if it were a geographical limitation. If I do this, I can easily translate the organizational structure of the traditional service club to online communities of practice, with democratic forms fully intact. Nothing need be lost.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Think Globally, Act Locally.
Large clickable detailed world map 2.3MB with cities, longitudes and latitudes.

What is Community?

Even though we need to move on with the course outline, I am pretty sure that when the course ends it will all come back to this question of "What is community?"

Amy Lenzo says in Community and Technology

I mention beauty in the sense of an attractive aesthetic, yes - I'm a big believer in the power of line and space and color - but equally in the sense of kindness and care for the whole, creating a psychologically "safe" space in which people feel free to speak up and know they will be listened to. A space where they can easily find the tools they need to use and feel confident in using them. A space where all can feel equally valid and important to the whole. Having a buddy system can help with this, and that idea came out of this group quite organically, which is great.

I believe that a sense of belonging can be ensured in smaller groups where we don't have to compete to get a voice. You know that at a meeting of ten or fifeteen people, that you are going to be heard. I also hear what you are saying about the "whole". A community should have integrity of the whole. We should always be able to count the membership on our fingers and toes and say - There are 15 members, therefore a majority (relative number, relative to the whole number which is the membership) is 8! We should be able to count relative quantities at any time because we know the whole number of the membership. Without a whole number we can hardly calculate relative quantities.

Community is not about technology, it's about people, and when the focus of the conversation is too centered on the technology it draws attention and energy away from the whole and our ability to create or facilitate community together.

Yeah. Give me simple, common platforms like email, email groups and group chat and give me a handful of people who are committed to preserving and promoting traditional democratic forms and you can have all of your exotic technology. I know which group is going to produce the best ideas. It won't be the ones with the high falutin' technology. The Internet is a testimony to that fact. The technocrats have given us poor forms for human organization. But it's not their field. They are not trained in Ethics, History or any of the Liberal Arts. They are technicians, kind of like TV repair people.

Derek says:

I like the term free range learning. What will benefit us all a lot is if buddy groups actually sprout up.

I like the idea of a buddy system because it gives established members a role. If there are members of FOC07 hanging about in the FOC08 course, then I think they should have definite supportive roles. If they are not blogging through the course as full participants then they should have definite "Buddy" roles to help assist us in organizing our projects. FOC07 should be recognized but not allowed to interfere with the ideas and experiments brought in by the FOC08 group. Giving them secure roles is one way to reassure everyone.

Leigh says:

If we were to go back to a traditional understanding of community and ignore for a moment what Wenger has brought to the word (i.e. "Community of Practice"), how might we think of an online community differently? Would it be different if we had children and teenagers in the community for example? In this sense, how many of us have really been a part of an online community?

In a traditional community there is usually an age restriction of about 18 years for adult groups. And I've never heard of mature adults joing the Scouts. Those are childrens groups. Even within that one group, the members may be further subdivided. However, I can't imagine applying that because we are not building private clubs online. A private club does not broadcast it's business to the world. I go to a club and it's closed. People don't wander in and out and pop in to cast a vote and disappear like they do on the web. When you broadcast your proceedings to the world, I don't think you have any right or obligation to verify anyone's name, rank or serial number. People prefer anonymity and they have a right to it as a matter of privacy.

Anyway, I think Nancy mentioned in another blog about "How do you filter?" I'm interested in finding objective ways to evaluate all aspects of community. For one, I would like to address how we can filter people in without comprimising privacy.

Amy Lenzo says:

I'm not sure that having an age range makes sense to me as criteria for defining community, but I do agree the term is used far too loosely these days - sometimes in ways that feel strange, even false, to me.

Notes on Meetings One and Two

(This is a post I began when listening to the first and second meetings but didn't publish. Dated August 19. The reason for the post was to give verifiable evidence of my listening to the two meetings.)

I define a "meeting" as a gathering of people in temporal and ordinal form. The most encouraging aspect of the two meetings that I have listened to was the adherence to some temporal and ordinal form. It wasn't just a batch of random. The meeting was centered with a leader as a point of reference. Leigh led everyone through introductions. He had an alphabetical list and called off the names which gave cue to each member of the meeting. Whenever a member wished to speak they gave cue to Leigh by raising of hands. I don't know what that is in elluminate, probably some visual smilie that you use to signal the group.

12 participants:

Leigh
Bee
Daryl
ElderBob
Greg
Jeffrey
Mary
Nancy
Sarah
Sean
Vida
Violeta

Because there were clear temporal limits (one hour) the meeting moved ordinally through the agenda. What I like about ordinal form is that it allows members an opportunity to fulfill their rights and responsibilities to speak to the group.

At one of the meetings, someone put a picture upon the screen which blocked the agenda that Leigh had made. I found that to be annoying. I would have rather seen the agenda.

Splitting the meeting into two sessions was a great idea but I think that there should be two facilitators, possibly an assistant, while retaining Leigh as the overall course leader. This way people know that the meeting will happen. The attendance of this meeting was slightly lower and I wonder if the missed meeting was a cause?

I wonder why only one session is posted afterward? With each meeting of two sessions, there should be four sessions posted.

I liked listening. It sounded like a verbal summary of what is being blogged. However, I found myself doing a bunch of other tasks and not really paying attention. I was kind of like reading online. I don't really read very well online. It's more like skimming, not attentive reading. It's like that with the blogs. At least I know it, so I just keep going back and reviewing what strikes my fancy. It takes several readings to scratch the surface of some of these blogs.

I also noticed something that ElderBob said about people gathering from different regions and times. Ha! I am blogging alot about organizing around time zones and this jumped out at me. Talk about people only hearing what they want to hear! Well, that's the way I listened to the meeting.

ElderBob also said something like "traditional communities were established on a rail line or waterway, along a common line". I thought that was interesting. people once had physical connection. I ask myself "What common lines exist now?" I think that there are some physical connections

ElderBob also said that "you can be a member of many communities". OK. I can buy that to an extent but I can only absorb so much. Offline, I can become a member of so many communities but not an unlimited number. Likewise we should remind ourselves that communities don't function when there are unlimited numbers of members because an unlimited number is not able to be counted and no rational discussion, deliberation or debate can take place (with the exception of very small groups of about 5 to 7 members). But in any case, a whole number is necessary if we are to calculate any relative quantity such as equality, majority and minority.

Bee: common ground

EB: Not geographical but mindset

Artie says: Yeah but it's mindsets of people who come across eachother at the same time on the Internet. I think that the temporal has superseded the geographical as a limitation. We are not separated by geography, but time. The web is does not overcome the time obstacle. The Internet is no faster than the old candlestick telephone. It's the number of people who have access at once that complicates.

What we need to do is take the old forms that Grandpa and Grandma utilized to bridge the geographical divides between people and apply them to the Time Divide.

EB: I live in one community that developed from a set of physical circumstances

Artie adds: We are facing a common physical limitation with the time issue. It governs us whether we like it or not.

Bee: When people come online they need a place to come to.

Artie says: How about small clubs that are easy to access according to local time? Small clubs of about 10 or 15 people meeting at a local time who are working on a program together.
Leigh ended the meeting with the suggestion that we also organize our own little 3 or 4 person meetings. I liked this idea because small groups are easier to schedule and to absorb. I think it would stimulate some good blogging.

The two meetings constitute two separate groups that are naturally divided by time as if it were a geographical limitation. They are united for one purpose as one community, but are not only two distinct meetings, but two distinct groups with distinct memberships. If they did not have two distinct memberships then there was no need for two meetings! (Get it?) They could present the same program at their own pace with full autonomy. Clubs should be as convenient to attend as those Rotary clubs that are distributed geographically. In Rotary, they put a club where people are, but we put a club when people are, in order to give a wide variety of choices as convenient as geographically placed clubs.

Looking at this page for Rotary Club meetings I looked up a few clubs and I found that traditional meeting times are breakfast, lunch and dinner, with dinner probably being the most popular. Most popular local times appear to be 6 or 7 pm, noon and 6 or 7 am. I think that clubs should be timed similarly with some minor tweaks. If you can't tell the local meeting time, then you are probably in the wrong club.

I don't think that times should be GMT unless the community of clubs has a thorough training session in Clocks and Time. At least a complete training session in the World Clock page. This would be covered in a practical dialogue form with no experts (as all practical dialogue is for the purpose of building community expertise within the membership).

People Who Share a Common Time for a Purpose

click to enlarge the map 91k

Also see: latitude and longitude page

I have come to a definition of an online community that is the best I can think of: People who share a common time for a purpose. This is broad enough to include all communities from a collection of individuals to a formalized group.

One myth about the web is that it is instantaneous. Yes, it is from one machine to another, but messages are not recieved and processed and responded to by humans instantaneously everywhere on the globe. The limitations of personal time zone have a very great impact upon how we can percieve "global community".

The web is global but not in a spherical sense. The distance between any two longitudes (meridians) determines the frequency of message cycles. Global community only exists where the frequency of message cycles allows enough communication to form a community. The longitude that runs down through Sweden, Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Libya, Chad, Republic of South Africa, Congo, Zaire, Angola, Nambia and South Africa is global with the web. Frequency of messaging is highest where any two given longitudes are closest together. Message frequency lowers as the distance between two longitudes increases.

So if we traveled the same distance described on a latitude either from East to West or visa versa, we could not call it global community. The latitude that runs from Spain to China is not a global community in the same sense as those based within a relatively narrow time zone because those who live within two longitudes that are closer together can have a greater message cycle frequency, exchanging multitudes of messages in one day, while those who are exchanging within an equal latitude may have a frequency as low as one cycle per 24 hours.

When I speak of time zones and geography, I am using this as a visual reference. Someone working the night shift in Spain would span the divide to China. So, in this blog, my constant references to time zones and geographical location is only a hint or pointer that must be translated into personal time zones.

The Meaning of Community

I am reading The Meaning of Community by Ann Boyles:

While pundits ponder whether or not Internet users form any kind of viable
community as they sit at their computers in farflung corners of the world, a
deeper and more serious issue is the manner in which the entire structure of
computer networks undermines more traditional kinds of community
organization.

The mainstream meaning of the word "community" has changed very much since the popularization of digital media. Language has been wildly stretched either because the meaning has changed or perhaps it has been this stretching that has distorted the meaning? I lean toward the latter description of how things have changed. Words have been used ignorantly by promoters of so-called "communities" just for the purpose of promoting a certain digital platform into popularity. A good example is all of the PHP forums out there. The vocabulary of the PHP forum is fixed.

It is possible to have Guest posting in relationship to the membership of members, but administrators, seeking to attract more traffic, allowed "members" to join who were in no way qualified for eachother. The person simply needed to fill out a short form that a 12 year old could do in less than 2 minutes, and "Presto - you're a member!" So the meaning of the word "member" has been enervated.

Traditionally, a membership of individuals must be qualified. I have been involved in many communities where the very minimum requirements were that I attend at least two or more consecutive meetings, and it was expected that I regularly participate in the programs that the community offered because these programs advanced the purpose of the community.

Words like "Group" too have no meaning because a group traditionally would be organized according to temporal and/or ordinal limits, and not only exist as a random and unlimited collection of individuals.

The very words "Discussion" and "Forum" mean little much like what we are accustomed to.

A discussion is a group speaking in an organized, ordinal form, the circle formation (ABC ABC...) being one of the most well known, popular and versatile.

A debate is an argument presented before a third party for evaluation or judgement. It has a beginning and an end, it does not just go on and on.

A forum is an organization of varied discussion forms, not just an organization of topics, but an organization of process.

I advocate a return to the traditional meanings of community. I feel that community should be an empowering experience. Most so-called communities culminate their communications in an offline action. I am interested in the power to organize an online action through democratic deliberative forms.

People use e-terms. It's eThis and eThat. I was searching the web for "eDemocracy" and found groups who were using the web as a messageboard to promote offline democratic organizations. That is not a true eDemocracy. The organizing efforts of an eDemocracy culminate in online action. The election of it's membership would be one of the basic online actions.

"Information is another word that has been stretched. People say that "information has increased". When I have a verbal conversation with someone, it is not catagorized by the public as "relevant information". So while a chat is information, it's not relevant. Does it require preservation?

I think the correct meaning is that there is a "people overload". There are too many people to deal with. Seems like everyone wants to have the biggest group instead of the better group.

As much as knowledge has increased with the recording of information, knowledge becomes obsolete as the technology changes and formats are replaced.

A "meeting" of posters along the line of a latitude can not be easily facilitated in real time, therefore a new form must arise deserving of it's own name.

Terms like "discussion" "meeting" and others have a meaning that includes "broadcasting the communication". Why should a chat or meeting be broadcast? People think that community will grow if it is accessible. How did traditional communities like Rotary International manage to grow their memberships to where there are more than 32,000 clubs and over 1.2 million members world-wide?

See the Glossary of Terms