6) What Does Community Mean to You?

I can hear my current co-workers groan when I read this question, as I'm constantly reminding people about the purpose and reasons for having a community! I take the concept quite literally. By that, I mean to say how important I believe it is to simply understand the word.

The word "community" literally means "joint ownership", and that's a drum I bang at every opportunity, I don't mind admitting! So I think it's easy to understand what community means, but (evidently) it's also easy for a business to forget that meaning.

Too often businesses don't actually want to share, or effectively give away, ownership of a community to its members. What they're really looking for is a captive (if happy) audience. One of the reasons I gravitate toward open-source is because businesses that have adopted it typically share that same philosophy of joint ownership.

So that's what community means to me. It's the part of the business and/or products that we're willing to consider as jointly owned with the users. That's where the essential sense of belonging comes from, and the reason people feel a familial loyalty to a brand or product or company. You can't buy it from them, but you can have it by giving something away. It's no longer becomes about give or take, commerce or economy, but a social exchange in a very real meaning of the sense. They spend time on the community platform to be with people who share a joint vision; not because they particularly want something from it.

If it's a one-directional broadcast that's used to send out thinly veiled adverts to a captive audience, I don't think I'd be the best person for that job. If it's about creating a place of belonging, where members really feel that they have an influence over the direction of the business and its products, and of "finding the others" as Doug Rushkoff likes to say, that's definitely my bag.