Community
I have long thought about the word community, and what it means. I have pondered what it is that makes us join a community, or when does a group become a community, is community a place, space, or can it be virtual, what are the responsibilities of a community member, and do different members have different rights and responsibilities, are there supper community members? All interesting questions that I will not try to answer in this essay but what I will do is examine what it means to be a community member.
A good place to start is to define what community means. Dictionary.com partially defines community as “a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually preceded by the word ‘the’)”
That brings us to the issue of diabetes. We who have diabetes can certainly be called a group. But does that make us a community? Do we include others who are important to us? Yesterday I wrote about the type 10, 15 and 20’s in our life. Certainly we would want to define our community large enough to include them. After all I doubt our community would last long without them. This inclusion could fall under the part of the definition that says interests.
So what about others? Should we include doctors? They care for us and that brings me to my final point. Our community is obviously large. So large in fact that groups like TUdiabetes form their own community which is now a community within a larger diabetic population.
What will our community be? Who will we include, and if we include someone how will he try to make them feel welcome? Within a few weeks we will top 30,000 members. That is 30,000 people who have told us that at some point they are interested in our community. So this is the question? How do we keep the simple touch and manage the community the same or better than when we had a few hundred. But there is even a more important question. Is that the type of community we want? If it is then who among us will step up and help it happen.
Community is not something that just happens; community is an engine that needs tuned occasionally. So like all engines we need people to step up and be mechanics, misfits and good laughers and hard workers. In short we need you. Because community it not passive, true community is active, step up and do your part. In fact we need everyone’s help.
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Rick