So, I am doing a bit of catching up as I haven’t been able to follow everything on time. I did try to install the IPFS but never succeeded, so here are some thoughts about community that I’ve been thinking about ever since Prof. Downes involved us in that google doc writing.
First of all, (and after listening to Amy Burval conversation this became more clear) I really don’t think that community is necessarily consensus. For me, community is about reaching out to people that somehow inspire us by challenging our understanding of reality or what we do. We don’t necessarily have to agree with them or to reproduce their views or methods as much as to use their argumentation to get to know ourselves better. For example, Jenny (Mackness) talked about betweenness; that made me think of what that word meant to me, or how I related to her suggestions in defining this term, or Prof. Downe’s interpretation of community which is why I am now writing this post.
Bottom line is for me that community is primarily an expression of wanting to become better, knowing more or relating to otherness in a way that lights up one’s own path of being. Otherness in this sense, creates the challenge of having an opinion for yourself while community is gradually formed by the people one chooses to connect with in order to find his/her identity.
This is why it is so hard to make community members work together. It’s not so much about trust as it is about making all members share the exact same purpose when everyone is in pursuit of a different thing. People can be in the same community and still have different objectives. Consensus is probably the extremely rare case when community members actually agree on what they want, the way to get it and their own personal responsibility and accountability in getting it.