Part 1. The Case for Digital Communities
1.1
DEFINITION OF COMMUNITY
âSome people think they are in community, but they are only in proximity. True community requires commitment and openness. It is a willingness to extend yourself to encounter and know the other.â
âDavid Spangler
Like many young people, Iâve spent most of my life trying to figure out where I belong, how I contribute, and why it all matters. I didnât realize there was a term associated with the things I was looking for: community.
Merriam-Webster defines community as âpeople with common interests living in a particular area.â Growing up, I closely followed this definition and thought community was people who lived close to meâa belief reinforced through my exposure to local community service activities such as picking up trash on nearby hiking trails, planting trees in city parks, and delivering meals for seniors in the neighborhood.
As I was having conversations while making this book, one student I spoke with asked, âWhat even is community building? Is it like building houses?â
This mindset isnât uncommonâand if itâs where youâre at right now, youâre not alone. Community seems like itâs used to describe all sorts of things. Itâs a pretty word, but also pretty vague and sometimes just plain confusing. Itâs also hard because as you see above, community means different things to different people.
Hereâs my understanding of community: a group of people who build power together through belonging and mutual care.
Using this definition, Iâll show you community is more than a plot of land or building houses. Itâs even more than a group of people with a common goal or shared identity. Digital technologies change what it means to be local and allow us to connect whenever, wherever, with people and experiences previously out of reach. It is critical for us to expand the meaning of community, in order to tap into its full potential to bring people together and help them achieve much more than they wouldâve been able to alone.
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Itâs an understatement to say my personal definition of community has evolved over time, as Iâm sure yours have as well.
My own definition started to shift from people who live close to me to people who look like me in middle school. Iâd always attended Sunday Chinese School, and as a child, hung out a lot with my parentsâ friendsâwho also happened to be Taiwanese immigrants. Naturally, in sixth grade when I had to find people to sit with at lunch, I gravitated toward others who looked like me.
In high school, community became people who did things with me. My high school has over 2,000 students and over thirty clubs and organizations on campus. In ninth grade, I signed up for everything: STEM Club, Key Club, Interact Club, Future Business Leaders of America, and more. I started feeling a lot more connected to fellow club members than âother Taiwanese immigrants in Vancouver, WA.â Participation in school clubs prompted me to realize a community isnât just a collection of people with a common geographical location or cultural identity. Deeper forces are at work to create a sense of belonging, which doesnât just magically appear; people have to do things together. Through club meetings, service projects, pizza parties, and more, the practices we engage in spark connections of trust and care.
During my junior year of high school, my definition of community changed yet again: the group of people I invite into my life. Up until this point, I largely believed communities could only form in-real-life. But during junior year, I wasnât at school much due to traveling for meetings and conferences. As a result, I stepped back from a lot of school clubs and the communities I had found within them. It wasnât a surprise the sense of closeness I felt rapidly deteriorated. After all, I wasnât seeing people in person every day anymore.
What did surprise me is how I was able to find other communities online to fill the gaps without ever having in-real-life club meetings and pizza parties.
I joined #BuiltByGirls, a Slack community of over 2,000 female and non-binary young people interested in careers in tech and social impact. I found myself spending hours in the #girls-building-now and #you-glow-girl channels, where I was able to support and team up with peopleâsomething I previously believed could only be done in-person. When I was intentional about caring for others, even online, I was able to recreate intimate community.
This revelation was exciting to me. Suddenly, I could belong to so many more communities! My experience greatly contrasted the traditional definition of community as a plot of land.
Finally, the most recent shift in my perception of community came in March 2020. To be honest, I didnât think much about community before COVID-19. Did you? For many of us, community was always there, something that kind of just happened. In-person connections of convenience, from bumping into people in hallways to spontaneous conversations at lunch, allowed us to get to know each other and facilitated deeper relationships over time. Where community bloomed, it was beautiful. Where it didnât form⌠no biggie, right? We can suck it up and make it through a lifeless club meeting or two.
But COVID made me realize it was a biggie, and we canât afford to cross our fingers and hope community magically forms on its ownâespecially online, where itâs even more unlikely to happen. Online communities are completely opt-in, and because people arenât required to be in them like school or work, itâs impossible for communities to accidentally blossom. Furthermore, social distancing exacerbated difficult emotions people grapple with, like feeling lonely, out of place, or ignored. The pandemic made it impossible to continue pushing these feelings under the rug. Instead, it called for new digital community structures and processes that helped us become aware of what the people around us are going through.
We could no longer ignore the importance and significance of being part of flourishing communities.
And community isnât just about the well-being of individuals. Many of them exist to tackle real problems and injustices. But how can we make an impact when every community member is not adequately cared for and supported? How can we make the world a better place if our own community isnât flourishing?
Community building starts with creating a culture where every community member feels connected, supported, and empowered. In the process of helping people discover and hone their gifts, we realize community building is about building power in people. Itâs showing that by pooling together our resources and making decisions together, we can take care of each other and the world around us.
Dustin Liu, the ninth Youth Observer to the United Nations, once told me, âA community thatâs very strong for me is one where I can bring my full self. Making people feel special, making people feel seen, and making people feel heard is just so crucial.â Communities should help people feel as though they are growing with each other into the best versions of themselves. By doing so, positive communities help people realize their full potential and be of service to the world.
This is the arc that shaped my understanding of community: people who live close to me â people who look like me â people who do things with me â people I invite into my life â people who make me feel powerful through a sense of belonging and mutual care.
Whereas my definition of community used to be limited by geography and identity, Iâve realized community is about caring spaces that enable me to grow into my authentic self.
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Interestingly, this definition forces us to realize many of the âcommunitiesâ we belong to are less community-like than we expect.
Ruqaiyah Angeles is a Muslim Filipino woman and a computer science student at San Francisco State University, passionate about increasing representation within the tech industry. She recognized early on the importance of community between people of color, women-identifying folks, and other marginalized people in STEAM. As a result, Ruqaiyah relentlessly searched for spaces where she could meet like-minded people with similar aspirations and vision for the future.
When I first came across Ruqaiyahâs LinkedIn profile, I was intrigued by the sheer number of online communities she belonged to. In her search for belonging and solidarity as an underrepresented person in the tech space, Ruqaiyah had amassed a number of rolesâalmost all of which had the word âcommunityâ somewhere in the title or job description.
I could see why Ruqaiyah found these organizations so attractive. They had bold visions, such as âto connect, inspire, and empower girls in STEAMâ and âto build wealth and prosperity in diverse communities through jobs in technology.â It seemed these were places where she could find her people. By calling the group a âcommunity,â these organizations promised care and belongingâsomething many werenât prepared to offer.
This became clear within the first few minutes of my conversation with Ruqaiyah, who described one of the organizations: âAs far as virtual community goes, itâs very one-sided. They kind of lecture, lecture, lecture, talk, talk, talk. Itâs not necessarily a collaborative thing. During meetings and other big events, the community is very dictatorship-like.â
This completely blew my mind. It confused me how community and dictatorship could describe the same organization and how community could ever be a one-sided thing.
Why did Ruqaiyah feel like this was a community? It was the idea people with a common interest came together in one placeâonline. This understanding was similar to what I thought community meant before I experienced the connection that comes from doing meaningful things together. Ruqaiyah reached a similar conclusion: Just because people are in one place, associate with the same identity group, or label themselves a âcommunity,â it doesnât mean connections magically emerge. Connections on a deeper level require work, no matter how many âthings in commonâ people start out with.
From a marketing perspective, âcommunityâ is sometimes substituted for groups with demographic similarities. Fabian PfortmĂźller is the founder and CEO of the Together Institute, an organization dedicated to building healthy, caring, and impactful communities. He notes âthe term âcommunityâ is really hot in the sales, marketing, and events spaces, because it alludes to more than just a transactional customer-company relationship.â Tacking on the community label to products and experiences provides a sense of cohesion and good intention.
The term community is similarly hot in the youth changemaking space because it alludes to more than just a transactional student-organization relationship. In a world where students often start organizations for clout, calling something a community softens and adds a positive connotation. You can even see this phenomenon in how we describe our schools: Iâm not just a student; Iâm part of the learning community at Union High School. See how that leveled it up?
Fabian believes when most people say âcommunity,â they mean âa series of monthly events, a Facebook page, a group of customers that has loyalty toward a specific brand, a yearly conference, all social media followers, everyone who uses Twitter, people who happen to vote the same way.â The incorrect use of community has immense repercussions. We end up promising things we canât provide, which leaves community members feeling disillusioned by the idea and even a bit betrayed. The more we use it incorrectly, the more âcommunityâ loses its meaning.
In the case of most youth-led nonprofits, clubs, and friend groups, this deceit isnât intentional. Most people want to do good, but simply donât know how to create spaces of belonging and power, or what structures and practices they can adopt to do so. As a result, many groups and organizations never become true communities and realize their full potential.
Ruqaiyah told me about a few more âcommunitiesâ she was a part of: âItâs very much run by the people who started it. Everyone else kind of jumps in and out whenever they want to.â For another one, she said, âItâs a community as far as everybodyâs down to support and help out and be a part of things⌠but we donât talk to each other really.â Almost as an afterthought, Ruqaiyah asked, âDoes that make sense?â
She paused a bit, and with a slight shake of her head, answered her own question. Communities canât form if people donât even talk to each other.
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There is a growing problem where we call things communities, even when theyâre not. Part of it is a simple misunderstanding of what community is. Iâve spoken with dozens of people in quasi-communities, who share itâs hard to know whether youâve discovered a real community if you havenât personally experienced one before. Instead, anything that involves shared identity is now a community, even if it doesnât cultivate a sense of belonging or collective power.
This begs the question: What do thriving digital communities look like? How do we create them?
Before we dive into the step-by-step âhow to build communityâ section, I want to share two different stories of people who have redefined community and created the online spaces they need. Weâll explore the themes in these storiesâcreating space, giving people real power, small experiments to foster community spiritâin later chapters. For now, let these stories spark your questions and ideas about how the different components all fit together.
First, the rest of Ruqaiyahâs story.
As she continued traversi...