Coping 10: Community

Some people who know me might find this one funny, given that I have a slightly inflated sense of self-sufficiency, but here we go anyway! While it's possible to get a lot of things done alone, there are many things in life that require the efforts of more than one person. Sometimes, we organize in groups based around family, friends, or work. Other times, what's necessary is something more nebulous: a community.

Community, for me, is often a loose-ties kind of concept, with people coming together around a shared interest or focus. The informality of this kind of community-based work makes collaboration a little more complex, requiring a degree of ad hoc conversation and decision-making, rather than just feeling certain that we already know what structures exist.

But these discussions are often the most fruitful. When we examine our structures and assumptions, we learn about ourselves and the people we're collaborating with, what our values are, and how we want to work. The complexity and looseness of working within a vague or ad hoc community, turns out to be a value, removing obviousness, and forcing assumptions to be challenged. Without pre-agreed formal structures, there is an opportunity to learn and make new things, to find new ways of organizing, and to understand collective and individual needs better.

I was reminded of the importance of consciously discussing community values by a recent talk on governance and financial decisions within GIMP, a major F/LOSS graphics project. In laying out the financial, legal, and organizational decisions the project had recently made, it also became clear which values and ideals were important to the project. Most important, in their eyes, was emphasizing the relationships within the community. This insight has been sticking with me for the last couple of days, and provides a nice reminder that purposeful work with others, within grassroots structures, is not only useful, but also offers opportunities for self-insight.