Stephen Downes

This is a shortish post I wrote in response to Alan Levine's post On "Building" Community I Got Bubkis. To be clear, I think he has been doing a masterful job of community building over at OE Global. But no, the hordes aren't beating a path to the OEG website. Because that's not the sort of community we can build without a lot of marketing. Here's how I see it: the old definition of community is based on proximity. So, online, 'building community' usually means pulling everybody into the same place. But the new definition (according to me) of community is based on similarity. So online, 'building community' means connecting people to each other when they have similar interests. The real measure (if it can be measured at all) is the propagation of the ideas, not the concentration of (a mass of) people. (The bicycle illustration is intended to represent the common interest people similar to each other may have, even if they're in different online places)/