Varieties of Community

Pattern number within this pattern set: 
288
Davis Foulger
Oswego State University
Problem: 

There are different kinds of community that are driven by different kinds of communication. As new media emerge they will favor some kinds of community at the expense of others.

Context: 

When we talk about communities, we often talk at cross purposes because we are thinking about different things. Resolving the range of different kinds of community may be useful in resolving this sort of problem.

Discussion: 

A TypologyOfCommunities which is emergent from discussion at the DIAC-02 Symposium.:

1.Locality (Space Propinquitous). Driven, to a large extent, by propinquitous interactive media.
1.Residential. Nieghborhoods, towns and other localities. This is the scale of community that
most books the claim a decline in communities are talking about.
2.Workplace. Most of us spend close to a third of our waking hours in a workplace.
Automobiles enable distributed workplaces. Hence a rise is recognizably autonomous
workplace communities is probably at the expense of residential communities. A modern
bifurcation of what was once (most often) a single community.

2.Regional (Scaled Propinquitous). Driven, to a large extent by mass media (television, radio,
newspapers, etc), especially regional and national news and events. Large crowd dynamics and
speeches are also important.
1.Nationalistic
2.Regional Affiliation
3.Fan

3.Virtual
1.Time Synchronous
Chats
MUD's, MOOs
Interactive gaming

2.Time Asynchronous
Computer Conference
Lists
Newsgroups

4.Interest-Based. This is orthagonal to the preceding
1.Clubs and Membership Organizations
Sports
Arts
Reading
Outdoors
Religious
Museums

2.Subscriber communities
Orchestra, Opera, etc
Magazines
Newspapers

3.Interest Collectives
Groups of Groups, often on a regional, national, or international basis. LAW, AAA,
Girl Scouts, etc

Solution: 

See discussion.

Pattern status: 
Released