community

A community is a space or group in which members feel a sense of belonging. While I am at best an amateur at it, building community is one of my core values.

Kinds of Communities

Some communities, like your neighbors, arise by chance, while others are cultivated for a purpose. I’m especially interested in the latter, particularly:

• “A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic and who come together to fulfill both individual and group goals.”
• “The community of inquiry is broadly defined as any group of individuals involved in a process of empirical or conceptual inquiry into problematic situations.”

I’m building note.garden as a tool to support communities of inquiry and practice.

Quotes

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday

Resources for Building Community

• The Art of Community by Charles Vogl is on my reading list as a guide to building communities
• To build a community, elevate the storytellers argues that communities are distinguished by shared memory: they “remember, together, by telling stories”. The author advises “To build a strong community, elevate storytellers. Find the stories and memories that show what you stand for together, why you gather, and create ways for those stories to become fables, myths, and legends.”