"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
What do you think?
I want your help to collaboratively come up with a way to define the strength of a community.
This post is an offshoot of my imagining of myself in 2020. This means I have 10 years to get this right! However, I need your help. How would you a****s the strength of a community? I would like to be able to think of some general ideas until we get some consensus and then maybe think of some metrics that can be used to measure them.
My working definition of a communities strength is a combination of principles: Purpose, Infrastructure, Diversity, Participation, and Security.
What bout you?
This post is an offshoot of my imagining of myself in 2020. This means I have 10 years to get this right! However, I need your help. How would you a****s the strength of a community? I would like to be able to think of some general ideas until we get some consensus and then maybe think of some metrics that can be used to measure them.
My working definition of a communities strength is a combination of principles: Purpose, Infrastructure, Diversity, Participation, and Security.
- Security. This is one of the trickiest but possible the most integral part of a community. If an individual is afraid to really participate in a community then their opinion will be influenced by this fear or absent altogether which weakens Diversity and Participation .
- Participation. Simply put a community is a group of people, without the people there is no community. The more participation in a community then the more accurate a perspective the community will have of itself as a wh***. If only 1 farmer is hit by late blight it would be detrimental for him to not be able to share this with the local farming community that may become affected.
- Diversity. Although this in some ways can be tucked into Participation it is too important and warrants its own division. If Participation is a bright flashlight in a dark room then Diversity is the number of flashlights. One flashlight can only illuminate one corner of a room, 4 flashlights can see each corner. Ideas and opinions that would not even be on one person's mind could be painfully obvious to another giving the community strength.
- Infrastructure. Simply put this is the ability to physically communicate. Maybe a small community can function of direct verbal communication. Geographically larger communities will most certainly need different means to communicate efficiently. This could be phones, internet, newspapers, which use roads, wires, or satellites or even just a place to gather but the main idea is that communication needs to be possible and effective for its community.
- Purpose. This will decide the parameters necessary from the previous principles.For instance if the purpose of a community is discuss the local farming situation in Honduras, then it would not be necessary to hook up a satellite phone to speak with a biologist studying penguins in Antarctica, altering the parameters of Infrastructure. However maybe some community in the same climate on the other side of the globe experienced a similar instance with a related crop, it would be beneficial to get their opinion despite the cultural differences, increasing Diversity. Those are large examples but if you look at Purpose as an end and the previous four ideals as a means to an end you get an effective estimation of a communities strength.
What bout you?
Views: 7
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Comment by Mita Williams on March 9, 2010 at 1:28am
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Hello Marcus! Just wanted to say I'm particularly interested in this question that you are asking the Evoke network. I'm currently reading a book called Community by Peter Block and he would love your question. Block makes the case that too often we focus on the problems of a community and we rarely take the time to ask what is a community's strengths, or as he puts, its gifts.
I would put forward that the strength of a community is directly related to how much its people care about it. Thanks for your work. +20 for collaboration!
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