Thanks Anne-Marie. Is there a reason "community" is bold? Are we suppose to bold those that are more important to us, or just list them all as equal?

support, learning, growth, help, assistance

great question Soren....I just deleted bold community from tag list (since the resulting tag cloud will be a collective definition of community, the word community is redundant).

Please list all words as equal :D

Thanks. Also looks like it is best if they are all one-word, "Vision," for example, instead of "shared vision."

Connections, Vision, Care, Democracy, Assisting, Relationships, Relevance, Support, Action, Friends, Voice

Anne Marie Bellavance,

You have already a wonderful comprehensive list. Only a few additions if they are not already in your list: daily appreciation, friendship, community connections, East West relations, outreach, allies building community, community traditions and practices, meetup, mutual support, harmony, interpersonal relations.

Thanks for this marvelous effort!

ritual, festival, symbols, myths, communitas, carnival, liminal, folklore.

Love. service, volunteerism, friendship, missions, give, share, connectedness, awareness, joy, peace, synchronicity, support, creativity, cultures, beliefs, heart, soul.

Talk is... cheap

Put your mouth where your key words are.

Sex sells (buy now).

Du verstehst mich nicht!?! Kommunismus wird alle Suchmaschinenen ersetzen!!

;D nmw

ps: I guess I cannot make any links -- links are perhaps the quintessential community commodity.

psps: did FZ ever sing "I'm the click oozing out from your fingertip"?

pspsps: the Central Scrutinizer is alive and well (even if I do think it's a "miserable failure")

pspspsps: On omidyar.net, "community" is a secret ;D

Acceptance, Alliances, Belonging, Complex, Circles, Collaborative, Connection, Conversation, Dialogue, Education, Energy, Embrace, Expression, Family, Groups, Guild, Layers, Love, Network, Openness, Organizations, Relationship, Social, Space, Stories, Support, Survival, Togetherness, Tremendous, Understanding, Vision, Willingness, Wisdomsharing, Whole, Woven

(excellent thread Anne-Marie...i was moved by Rory's post)

commonality, purpose, vision, volatile, breathing, inspiration, expiration, flow, sharing, work, trust, compassion, empathy, wealthy, abundant, reciprocal, hug, smile, warmth, tenderness, struggle, determination, commitment, enduring, fellowship, bonding, boundaries, segmented, complex, dense, secretive, public, irrational, connected, rooted, historic, relevant, surprising, unexpected, wild, organized, tender

Ubuntu, Heimat, Heart, Center, Woven, Blessed, Heterogeneous, Agora, Tapestry ...

Thanks for asking.

Be well.

Here's some I don't see yet:

Friends, Faith, Initiative, Teamwork, Collaboration, Identity, Progress, Opportunity, Struggle, Language, Peacebuilding, Reputations, Testimonials, Growth, Good, Enterprising, Fun

Oh, I forgot my "community tags":

communication, language, vocabulary, whatdoesthewordwordmeanisitthesamethingasatagisitsomethingdifferentthankeywordidontunderstandanyofthis

:D

Community helps us bring out the best in ourselves and others.

From the human perspective I think:

People living together with common ideas, beliefs and goals who share their history seeking to improve and provide for the life of their families and future generations.

Anne Marie, Nice idea. I've like the idea of folksonomies from the moment I first read about them in Clay Shirkys post on them.

But I'm not sure they make that much sense as a tool for definition of a term. They seem to make more sense for categorization and access to a large body of information.

I'm saying this because when I tried to come up with "tags" for community, sentences rather than key-words come to mind. Things like:

1. There are many kinds of community. For example, communities of function (which are created by currencies) & communities of identity (which are created by naming and membership processes).
2. John Taylor Gato points out that there is a large confusion between community and network. Communities are what we belong to that we don't have a choice about. Networks are the groups we join by choice.
3. Communion and community are very closely related. Both exist in the spiritual level of people's being.

Hope this helps!

Eric Harris-Braun said:

John Taylor Gato points out that there is a large confusion between community and network. Communities are what we belong to that we don't have a choice about. Networks are the groups we join by choice.

"community and network" sounds alot like what I refer to as "Wisdom of the Language" vs. "Wisdom of the Crowds".

When I did my master's thesis about standardization of descriptive practice within archival institutions in the early 90s, I found that document type and/or form/genre were very meaningful for information retrieval. However, this terminology is also very difficult to define. I also found that titles of documents are very meaningful, and there is something like a "theme"-"rheme" relationship between the "content" and the "title" of a document.

There have been many attempts to use natural language for information retrieval -- and while this is probably an area that will continue to be very fruitful, the understanding of natural language is still quite basic and is largely insufficient for information retrieval. Also, not everyone speaks the same way. When an English person says "pavement" and when an American person says "pavement" they may actually mean quite different things. Likewise, people from different disciplines will use the same strings to mean completely different things (and this is close related to a discipline's "jargon"). When some people say "stages of development", they may be referring to Erikson or Maslow, and other people (i.e., people who are "thinking inanother discipline" [1]) may think of the same term as referring to Rostow.

friendship, chaos, organization ... should be an interesting tag cloud.

I had some difficulty to try and to respond with "tags" as I think that "community" is so much more than one or two or even twenty descriptive words...I wonder if others feel this way?

Brian: - Single words are hard, but the cloud should give a fuzzy warm feel of what it is. If you don't get this cloud thing don't worry about it, you are wired up a different way from the people who do, that is just one of the things that makes you different/special relish your difference and enjoy it.

bond, camaraderie

exclusive, some communities can be based on exclusion, keeping others away and separating from others is what sometimes builds the strongest communities. I know it is a bit negative, but I say it as it is.

hi anne! well you've got most of the ones I was thinking of already....hmmm perhaps also...convergence, symbiosis, festival, fair, trade...

Has anyone here ever heard of the idea that the "wisdom of the crowds" only works if people "vote" independently?

diversity, mission, interdependence, sharing, collaboration, teamwork, connection, market, closeness, proximity, cult, ostracize, clique, rules, growth, longevity, security, meeting, safety, gossip

ah, david -- you reminded me of a word I recently made up that also "fits the bill":

interreliance

trust, sociability, commensality, shrine, covenant, plaza, hearth, fellowship, alms, generosity,

and some of the shadows:

conformity, control