Stages of Community

As we’ve argued above, we think it makes sense to look at a community as both a static and a dynamic entity. The static map helps, above all, in surveying the current status of people, institutions, and resources, and thereby in making decisions as to “the next step.” The dynamic map, in contrast, is useful for setting the longer-term course of a community building effort. On this view, communities are seen as growing, developing systems that we can usefully categorize into a number of stages. Of course, there is no clear ontological distinction between the stages themselves; instead they are merely a conceptual framework to aid the community in knowing where it is and where it’s going. To return once more to our forest analogy, it might be useful to know that when walking long distances there is a set of phases one goes through: easy, energetic beginning, slow onsetting fatigue, serious tiredness, and – if one keeps going – a resolution to the tiredness which opens into a more even attitude toward the hike. These phases all flow seamlessly from one to another, but knowing where one is in this conceptual framework can making reaching the goal much easier.
So the question then is: what are the stages of community? We’re not yet 100% sure. But what we can say is that the starting stage of most communities is characterized by a series of important lacks. Most social systems qua communities currently lack:

• high levels of connectedness between community members and organizations
• trusting relationships between community members
• visibility and support for innovators
• recognized network access points
• open resource networks
• shared purpose and identity
• a map of the system (not geographic, but of participants and resources), and
• infrastructure (events, meeting spaces, websites) to regularly address systemic issues

Healthy, vibrant communities, of course, possess these attributes in spades, and the job of the community builder is to help communities move in that direction. It seems likely that once we have decided upon the key processes that lead to the desired states of our community – the bullet points above – we will do best not to consider the stage of a community as some monolithic whole, but to differentiate between various processes. What is the state of trust in our community? And of network strength? Do people know one another? Are innovators visible and supported adequately? And so on. This way we, as community builders, can retain our dynamic view of the system and work in an effective manner to play up our strengths and devote ourselves to unfulfilled opportunities.