Comm Unities

Communications Unity:

Forces: A sizeable group of people wish to communicate about a topic or activity.

Context: Communication is inhibited by a difficulty in communicating across organizational and conceptual boundaries.

Therefore: Create a bounded region within which communication can take place, express common ideas in shorthand phrases and connotations of familiar words. Systematically exclude categories of discourse that are not relevant to the group, or topic.

Resulting Context: It is possible to convey complex ideas within the problem domain more easily because much of the underlying context has been factored into relatively compact expressions.

As usual this not the definitive answer, more of a sketch, hopefully the GingerFactor isn't too high. --LarryPrice

Some examples would be great. For example, what is the "bounded region?" Is it when the chair of the meeting says what we are going to talk about and keeps the group from wandering off topic? What are the "expressions" in "Resulting Context?" Also, is there some history behind the name? Does it come from somewhere? Looking forward to learning what you mean.

Well I started this page from CommunityLifeCycle, so that might add some missing context. I'm wondering if bounded region is maybe too spatial a metaphor here, since CommUnities exist in both space and time. As far as compact expressions think of the noun and verb forms of the word 'troll' as used in the SlashDot community, and how much meaning can be conveyed that way. It's a complex topic, there's a certain degree of fuzziness built in to it. After all the boundaries of CommUnities are not all that definite. --LarryPrice