When is a community not a community?

What would you say are the factors that make up a community?

A group of people who are connected by a common interest? Sure, but that’s just scratching the surface.

Because if that were the only prerequisite, then this group of 850 people who recently set a Guinness World Record for Mattress Dominoes could surely be called a community. And while they’re obviously a wonderfully fun, creative, and charity-minded group of La Quinters, with their (lack of) depth of connection, I wouldn’t qualify them as a community.

For more depth, you could say a community is tied together by a skill that the members share.

Like computer hackers.

People with a secret language of code and Girl-with-dragon-tattoo-like crazy digital skills that send intelligence gathering organizations running for cover. Tied together through their own safer-than-the-Pentagon ether-networks.

And therein lies the problem.

They don’t know each other face to face. They don’t have coffee or a few beers together. Which has meant that their basic trust level, purely by the nature of their structure, is somewhere between precarious and Spy vs Spy-like. And now, the bubble has burst, as one of their insiders turned on them to get out of his own trouble. Huge story. Because now the members of that “community” don’t even know if they can trust each other.

When people within a community are stabbing others in the back, that’s not a community.

More on what actually makes a community will be coming in future posts. But rest assured, it goes a lot deeper than merely having a similar cause or talent.

And no, Cubs fans aren’t a community either. Not even 112 years of shared misery is a strong enough qualification…