There are a lot of good thoughts in this post from Doc Searles. I've been online for almost 20 years involved in all manner of groups. Haven't seen a real community, yet. The closest is this small group of automation bloggers. As we play with various kinds of social networks, these ideas are worth keeping in mind. [Gary]
Splotting glue. With his One Million Splotz of Glue Campaign, Lloyd Y. Asato is doing an important and commendable thing: building community through "everyday actions". He's talking about real communities here, where people actually know and care about each other [~] rather than the abstract demographic variety. He adds, These actions have the cumulative effect of increasing the quality of life in a community. By deliberately doing more of these specific activities we can build the kind of community we want to live in. I responded here a couple days ago to a question Lloyd asked here. Lloyd read my answer carefully and had several take-aways: Takeaway number one - Splotz of Glue can be snowballs, narrative points from which we begin a conversation on improving neighborhoods or the process of community building. It is not about the collecting and cataloging of glue, but of the contemplating and discussing. This is new to me. In my old career I needed to understand in depth and breadth so as to anticipate unintended consequences. Now I can do the snowball thing and enjoy the emerging consequences, intended or not. Takeaway number two - "community" and "community building" are very loaded terms and I need to be more aware of that. In this context I use "community" to describe geographically bound neighborhoods and "community building" as the process to increase or enhance social capital. Takeaway number three - which is an incomplete thought - is there something I am supposed to burn? Is it my process-centric thinking? Can someone help me with this part?
I'll try. Glue, snowballs and fire are all metaphors. Which means they frame a subject without being the subject itself. I've thought of "rolling snowballs" and "setting fires" as two frames on the same subject, which is spreading interest in, and conversation about, a subject. Not (I now realize) about building communities. With glue Lloyd's got something else going on. He also uses the verb build. So we're talking about construction here. Building community is barn-raising. Everybody contributes in their own way to something larger than themselves. So, two actions occur to me, as ways to build community. The first is to stop watching so much television. Community builds around communication (which it would have to, just to function), and communication in its most fundamental form [~] conversation [~] is two-way. TV is one-way. It is about consumption, not production. I'm not saying TV is Bad here. I am saying that it is too often a bad substitute for productive activity. For communities, it is more solvent than glue. The second is, build stuff. I've been amazed lately at the growing difference between conferences and workshops. Conferences are like television: everybody in the "audience" faces speakers and panels that comprise the conference's "program". In workshops, everybody participates. They get together in rooms and around tables and talk about common interests with purposes in mind. Progress usually happens. Stuff moves forward. It's amazing how well this works. You have to do workshops in person. Kurt Vonnegut writes, Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.
That's from Kurt's excellent short book, A Man Without a Country (Random House, 2005). Buy one from your local bookstore. I don't think he's saying "don't use electronics". I do think he's saying get together and talk to each other. There's no substitute for that. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
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