Web

There is a need to state the difference between a community and communitas.

A community is a broad classification and includes almost any gathering of people for whatever purpose.

We may have different interests, we may have different backgrounds and come from different parts of the world, but we have at least one thing in common: we are all netizens.

Since this web site is about change, especially about changing ourselves, there is one thing that we could learn about and change: it's the way we relate to each other, the way we communicate - or fail to do so -, the way we react and reply to each other's postings on forums and mailing lists.

Are Blogs Communities?

Being geographically separate would, at first glance, seem to preclude blogs from being categorized as a community. From the blog point of view this is too restrictive an interpretation of what it means to be ‘in community’. Discussion on a blog is where a relatively large number of people co-operate in a process leading to an action or attitude based on the collective intelligence. This collective intelligence, based on the freely given thoughts of anyone joining the blog, is very enticing. Collective intelligence is one of the signs of community. Reading a blog discussion gives a validity to personal thought often missing in the day to day world – it is approval from one’s peers – a tribal stamp of significance and self worth.

Hello Forbes,

I happy you joined me, in this site. As I told you, it's a good omen for wechange: this site has been recently created with the idea to have it become an active community working for change.

http://www.wechange.org/creating_communitas .
Your books deal with "real world" communitas, as opposed to the "virtual" community that I hope will soon develop within this site.

I wondered: what similarities, and what major differences do you see between those two kinds of communities?
Are there online communities that more like "communitas" than others?

I hope you will guide me to make wechange one of the best communitas online.

This site aims to work in cooperation with scores of like-minded other sites.

Many web sites that have been existing for a long time are a great source of information on topics much more narrowly defined that at Wechange. Just to give two examples:

• www.carfree.com in very informative on the field of better urban design and backed by a small but active community.
• www.reuniting.info presents in a compelling way both scientific and spiritual arguments for a healthier type of sexuality.

You have only up to Nov. 11th to vote against software patents and safeguard Free Software.

Free Software is about liberty, cooperation (among and between developpers and users), sharing, and more such values promotted by this site. This site is run by numerous Free Softare (Apache, Debian, MySQL... and Drupal) as a matter of ethical choice.

By following the appeal by Open Source Software leaders (Richard Stallman, Tim O'Reilly, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdorf and Monty Widenius) and casting your vote in the election for the European of the Year, you can show your support for Florian Müller, creator of the web site www.nosoftwarepatents.com and award-winner campainer.

This "Interpersonal Relationships" project aims to provide information on this topic, define the problem, highlight the consequences of such negative behaviour, point out to some solutions in the form of code of conduct and other forms. The project will also be the basis for the moderation guidelines that will eventually regulate the site wechange.

This site http://novaonline.nv.cc.va.us/eli/spd110td/interper/relations/relations.... may link to other useful web sites, worth investigating.

If you would like to help getting this project off the ground, please post your comment on the forum: http://www.wechange.org/forum/11 .

This handbook is a collaborative work of the members of the "carfree cities" project.
If you are interested to contribute to this handbook, say so in the forum and you will be given the right to add child pages to it.

Member contributions on the topic of car free cities:
http://www.wechange.org/taxonomy/term/43 .

Among which, you can have a look at calls for action on this topic:
http://www.wechange.org/taxonomy/term/43,18 .

Also, you can have a look at posts relevant to a specific area: