Thought for the night.

[randomness]

Community is when they give a shit whether you show up or not.

Comments

[awfief.livejournal.com]

*nod* My first connotation of "community" is more along the lines of "open source community", so my brain translates your "community" to my idea of "tribe".

But.....hell yeah.

[tyellas.livejournal.com]

Nail. Hit. On. Head.

This also sums up my concerns about my local social network right now - they're all very "eventy", I rarely get told that someone wants to hang out with me in particular, and I truly wonder if they'd care if I didn't show up...

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

Don't try that experiment unless you are really willing to find out the answer. I learned that the hard way.

yeah

[cthulhia]

it sucks to find out you're not really part of the community.

Re: yeah

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

No kidding.

[denyse.livejournal.com]

Of course, the people who get the most worked up if I don't show up are the people at work...
One time, someone at work was so concerned when another guy didn't turn up for his shift that they actually sent the police around to his house after he didn't answer his phone.
Turned out to be a scheduling error and the guy was in central america at the time. Oops.

[denyse.livejournal.com]

And of course, work's concerned because someone has to do the work!

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I'll be the first to agree that the workplace is also a community. Sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes actively hostile...but a community nonetheless. :)

[muffyjo]

Expressing a sense of 'mattering'. My friend kerri9494 once pointed me at a fantastic article on it from a conference she attended. (Damn, I hate it when I don't properly attach memory keywords.)

The gist of it was something to the effect of mattering being the one thing that we need. It doesn't matter who, where, when, etc, we need to have a sense that we matter in this world. And not only that, that we matter to someone. One of these days I have to go back and start tagging my posts.

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

Honestly, to me that's more friendship than community. Community is when they'd like you to show up and are happy when you do. Friendship is when they want you to show up, and are unhappy when you don't.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

One of my definitional rules of thumb is that a community is a group large enough to contain two people who hate each other's guts. So I'd go more with "notice when you show up" as opposed to "give a shit" or "like you to show up". And that noticing is collective, not individual; not everyone has to notice if you show up or not, just a chunk of people.