TransformingTheChurch.org's Public Blog

It's Simple; Communication and Interaction Help Build Community

I like Connected Communities!

I like the concept. I like the technologies. I like the communication among the members of its communities. I like how it enhances and, sometimes, even is responsible for building community. In my career in the commercial world, I have built several thousand Connected Communities and I've never been disappointed by their impact within their targeted communities.

However, don't think this is all "Buck Rogers."

Lots of our models and paradigms for the Connected Community hearken back to small communities in the pre-World War II era. The way physical communities were built in this period featured houses with front porches. In the cool of the evening, people would sit on the front porches or go on walks around the community. Neighbors would greet passersby from their porches and strollers would pause to talk for a while. Another neighbor would pass by and join in. Even if you were new to the neighborhood, you had a mechanism to meet and greet your neighbors. You weren't a stranger long.

You knew a lot about the people in your community from these front porch interactions; you made friends, you exchanged information, you cleared the air over some perceived slight, you traded small talk and, along the way, you became a community. 

The front porch and the sidewalk it faced were a social network!

In the suburbanization of the USA in the post-war period, instead of houses with front porches facing the street, people built housing tracks that put a focus on the backyard; most with fences. While higher density was achieved (more people per acre), our homes became inward focused instead of outward focused. Activities in our backyards were inherently more private; family and just a few friends.

We lost the simple social network of the porch and sidewalk. We lost the ability to build community from our front porches. We lost the social mechanism to meet, greet and talk among our neighbors as frequently as before. We lost these venues for the small neighborly interactions. We became more isolated. As we lost many of these interactions, our suburbs lost a big part of their sense of community.

The Connected Community tries to re-establish the front-porch-and-passerby mechanism of this bygone era. In the Connected Community, using the technolgies on which it is based, it is easy to find and interact with its members even at great distance. It creates simple ways for people to find, meet, greet, work and collaborate with our neighbors near and far (for both clergy and laity in our case) and hopefully, also along the way, build a stronger sense of community or create one where it didn't previously exist.