GrowingPains

Communities of Communities

I just finished Amitai Etzioni's interesting book "The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society". In the book, he makes the case for the ideas of the Communitarian movement:

"The success of the democratic experiment in ordered liberty (rather than unlimited license) depends not on fiat or force, but on building shared values, habits and practices that assure respect for one another's rights and regular fulfillment of personal, civic, and collective responsibilities. (p.255)"

In the book, he gives many examples of urgent societal problems and possible communitarian solutions. Although I don't agree with all of them in every detail, overall, I think the communitarian philosophy can make an important contribution to restoring the societal fabric which has been so dramatically torn in the past decades.

One idea particularly interests me. Communitarians want to help grow healthy communities. However, they claim that a precondition is that communities are not grown in isolation, but are continuously exposed to the needs and interests of other communities, in order not to become self-centered and turn against others. In other words, they envision supra-communities, communities of communities. Such communities span many different levels, including, of course, the national, but also the global level:

"While it may seem utopian, we believe that in the multiplication of strongly democratic communities around the world lies our best hope for the emergence of a global community that can deal concertedly with matters of general concern to our species as a whole: with war and strife, with violations of basic rights, with environmental degradation, and with the extreme material deprivation that stunts the bodies, minds, and spirits of children (p.266)"

Technology plays an important mediating role in the creation of supra-communities. Especially global communities are almost by definition virtual in nature. A wonderful example of the emergence of a  global "proto-community" was the one surrounding the GlobalVote 2004 project "where non-Americans get to vote". The idea was that, since US policies directly affect the interests of so many other countries in the world, non-American citizens should also have the right to vote for the American president.  A lot of  - predictable - flak of the "mind your own business"-kind emerged. The fascinating thing was that this was exactly what the 113,552 voters from 191 countries around the world thought they were doing!

Of course, this was just a very primitive example of a temporary community which hardly deserves that name, since voters did not get to know each other and did not verbally communicate or interact. Still, more permanent and advanced forms of such virtual political communities can easily be imagined.

Clearly, inter-community communication is a critical success factor for such higher-level communities to emerge. However, many questions can be raised. What does it mean to be a member of such a meta-community? What role do individuals play? Individual roles or as representatives of their communities of origin? Does such a supracommunity have interests of its own, or is it merely an aggregation of the interests of its consituent communities? What happens in case of conflicts between the higher and lower-level communities?

References

- A. Etzioni (1993), The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society, Touchstone, New York.

The EU: a Model of Community Development

It's April 30. a few minutes before the historic event of the European Union enlarging with ten new countries. This is probably unprecedented in world history: the peaceful expansion of an economic and political alliance with so many new members. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, much has been written about them in the past few years. Possibly turbulent, but certainly exciting times are ahead.

At one stage of its life, the EU was known as the European Community. For me, this typifies what the EU really is: a complex and very dynamic community of practice. True, its members are quite a bit larger than their counterparts in the average business or research community. Still, many fascinating lessons could be learnt about how community development under adverse conditions should (and should not) be done: governance, structure, practices, technologies (e.g. the Strassbourg site of the European Parliament being an analogy of a discussion forum, or perhaps just a mindless chatroom?). Name the buzzword in (virtual) communities research, and you can find an analogy in messy EU practice. And remember, if it works in Europe, it will work anywhere :-) 

A Butterfly Effect?

Lifecycle models are very important in capturing and reasoning about community dynamics. One well-known model is Richard McDermott's (2000) five-stage model of community development. The stages he distinguishes are: Planning, Start-up, Growth, Sustain, and Close. It is a typical model of birth, growth, maturity, and death.

In this post, I would like to focus on the maturity stage. Naive views often see maturity as a form of stasis: growth happened before (during 'childhood' and 'puberty'), but during maturity the community is stable.  Of course, lots of activity still takes place, but member roles, types of activities and the structural design of the supporting technical system do not change too much anymore. However, maturity, as in living creatures, really is much more of a dynamic equilibrium: the seeming stability is only the resultant of many processes and forces acting below the surface. In his model, McDermott alludes to this view by saying that during the Sustain-stage, communities grow and change as well, going through cycles of high and low energy.

In their related, more extensive community life cycle model, Wenger et al. (2002, p.109) say that the radical transformation or death of a community is just as natural as its birth, growth, and life, and that even the healthiest communities come to a natural end. They distinguish different ways in which communities can transform themselves: fading away, dying by turning into a social club, splitting or merging, or becoming institutionalized. The way they see transformation seems to focus on the end of the community, when it loses its identity. Is it always necessary to die as a community to radically transform, however?

An question that intrigues me is what it would mean to have a community radically transform itself while keeping its identity, like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly? Would it actually matter for a community to keep its identity in a major transformation? How could you know that the old community is still there, although its form may have (unrecognizably) changed? Are there specific indicators that could identify the need for transformation rather than gradual change? What processes would you need to transform without identity loss? What would be the qualitative difference with a community that has lost its identity by merging with another one? Anybody any thoughts?

References

R. McDermott (2000). Community Development as a Natural Step. Knowledge Management Review, 3(5):6,17-19.
E. Wenger, R. McDermott, and W. Snyder (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, Harvard Business School Press.