learnonline

You can't spell culture without cult and community without unity. 

In the last post, I mentioned that you can't expect a dynamic educational institution from a rigid process, and that the rigidity comes from having a small amount of people make all of the decisions. So if you want to build a dynamic educational institution, you need to start with including more people into the process, which means starting with community.

Before I go into what that looks like, I want to draw the connection between a community and an institution. A community is a set of people with a common goal and shared ideas about reaching that goal. If you grow that community, it comes a culture, and if you scale that even further, it becomes an institution.

In contrast, when building for a community, the aim is to scale it organically, much like an ecosystem. This involves fostering both high connectivity and diversity simultaneously. Unlike scaling for individuals, where the focus is on rapidly achieving specific goals after which they disengage, community scaling is about creating a sustainable, interdependent network. In this model, members continually interact, adapt, and contribute in varied ways, mirroring the complex relationships found in thriving natural ecosystems. An example of this is that you might create spaces for downtime because a community is built in part through socialization.

So the place to start is by building FOR a community, not building A community. When you are building a community, you are trying to draw peoples’ attention. What you might do is create a Facebook group or a Reddit channel and try to make the number of members go up, but the community itself never scales. The reason for this is because the goal was never to grow the community, but rather to capture the attention of its members. Attention is finite, and so it leads to zero sum games, whereas communities grow in part due to their open ended goals.