This is day two of the Masters Program. The question tonight is about community and how our impressions of communities have changed or been challenged in the last 24 hours. The definition of community has broaden and expanded for me.
Before reading the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, I viewed community in a very narrow way. I saw community as the environment in which I lived and/or worked. After reading Shirky's book and participating in the development of Cadre 12's community, I see that community reaches far beyond the walls I see everyday. Due to the tools of technology, especially the social tools, our communities are no longer bound by geographical barriers. My community includes all that I interact with on the various social networks that I belong to. Community encompasses so much more today then five or ten years ago. Five years ago, people with common interests and goals were only able to connect with those within a given distance from their home. Now with the advent of the internet and social tools, we see people from all over the world uniting around a given "cause" and forming large numbers of communities.
Some of the communities formed are small and intimate with those within the community getting to know each other well. Other communities are large and the people within them are loosely connected. Community has moved beyond face-to-face contact to include computer-to-computer contact. A sense of community is evolving and will continue to evolve as the social tools and the internet grow and change.
