CommunityBuilding

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The goal of CollaborativeHypermedia is to encourage and help people to work together toward common goals. For a group of people to cooperate effectively, they must get to know each other. They should respect each other and be aware of overlapping interests and common goals to become a community. It is important for creators of CollaborativeHypermedia to learn how a collection of individuals becomes a community, in general.

Efficiency

One slightly different approach to the challenge of learning "how a collection of individuals becomes a community" is to introduce two independent communities that have an over-lapping Objective. This approach may be especially appealing to groups that are striving to grow. By helping them meet common needs, it should be possible to...

help them meet their own group Objectives,
create an environment in which the members of each Group can get to know (and Trust) members of the other group.
provide common infrastructure support that makes them more efficient.

One might rephrase this: "A Community can become more effective when it does not act as an independent island, but uses an ecological space paradigm, seeking interaction and collaboration with an environment of communities having overlapping goals and interests, living in the same space."

It may also be important to note that the Internet is a vast space and that everyone has an absolute RightToLeave. Assuming that two groups are introduced to each other; those individuals from one group that "resonate" with those from the other group, may chose to fork off into a third, new group. If this third group gains a clearer sense of its Objectives and grows to out-strip the ambitions of either of the two initial groups, we have an interesting example of "synergy".

Some lessons in CommunityBuilding:

Books:

It might also be instructive to consider what constitutes community, and what makes it different from other agglomerations of persons, and thence how to emphasise or build those differences.

private club: strong sense of shared values, high probability of members knowing all members,
transit station: lots of people, but with very loose ties, most only temporary members
project teams: strong sense of shared values, cooperation, shared mission, permanent membership while the project is in progress, but then going separate ways when dissolved

Are there already wikipages that discuss this topic niche?

cf. BuildingVirtualCommunities. CategoryToDo: connect the two pages meaningfully.

CommunityBuilding

Efficiency

Discussion