"community"

[brainwane]

Let's not call things communities that are industries, or projects, or workplaces, and that aren't communities.

Comments

[magistrate]

One of the topics that comes up over here a fair bit is that there's a difference between "community" and "common interest group".

[brainwane]

YES. Absolutely.

[grrlpup]

Agree!

[brainwane]

*solidarity fistbump*

[libskrat]

It's a little akin to workplaces that proudly declare they're families, or even just "like family."


RUN AWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

[brainwane]

I know someone who has a ton of scar tissue around that precise issue.

[luinied]

Also things that are really just set comprehensions. Like, the set of all trans people in [city] is not necessarily "the [city] trans community".

[brainwane]

YEAH. Totally.

[wohali]

Some industries are especially guilty of this, like "IC".

Workplace community is the sort of group-think that terrifies me in every form. You might have seen the lambasting of one company this week for an inappropriate careers/culture webpage.

Projects in your list gives me pause. For OSS the line is blurry for me, but, I think an OSS project becomes a community when people hang together, virtually or in person. When it becomes more than just some rando on the other side of a pull request. The other thing I think of is the PM side of me, who says that a project is defined as "a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service". So if it's temporary, sure, it's not a community. A group of people that work on repeated projects are probably a community. I'm curious your thoughts on this one.

projects & communities

[brainwane]

"IC" -- integrated circuits? Not sure I know.....

I'm so behind on replying to comments here that I have entirely forgotten which company was particularly on notice in March, but I feel like there's probably another one just around the corner.

I think sometimes a particular project can give rise to a community. I tried to word what I said carefully -- "and that aren't communities" -- because sometimes projects are communities. I probably failed at precision in the service of concision! :-/

I'm not about to define what community is or isn't .... I guess what I'm saying is, instead of defaulting to the word "community" when meaning "group" or something like that, I would like to double-check myself and ask, do I actually think this is a community? And I would like others to do so as well.

[postpunkfemme]

right.on.

[brainwane]

*solidarity fist-bump*

useful framing

[brainwane]

update sorta.