I’m still working through sources to define community (see earlier discussion). Tara Hunt posts recently:

Community is not a buzzword to describe a monolithic mass of marketing data. Communities are made up of people with endless motivations, hopes, dreams and goals and all have unique personalities.

Click through to her post… more of a mantra than a definition… and I’m interested.

But in starting to build my own theory on community, especially defining how emerging technology (and communication tech specifically) influences how a community looks and operates, I’m headed towards very specific and more well-defined communities to start. It’s easier to grasp all the working parts if I do that. My initial launch point is “Cultivating Communities of Practice.” The book’s authors are knowledge management and organizational design experts, which makes the book much more practical in defining the means, ends, and value of a community. The “practice” part of a community really changes the context. I think online community designers (and moreso marketers) think about the social and connective part of communities — but rarely focus on the output, the value, the practice of a community.

I’m rereading the book now and marking up notes and thoughts. More to come.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 7:33 am and is filed under Web, Thought, Link. It is further classified using the following tags communities of practice, community, Link, reference, tara hunt, Thought and Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.