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To me the point where a "group" becomes a "community" is when its able to create sustainable growth of membership simply through its activities. Actual membership of the community may have high turnover: new parents, babysitting co-ops, and sports leagues come to mind. However, the nature of the community is such that it continually renews membership, leaders, and elites.

Taking your examples above:

Blogs are most often themselves not communities. If the primary author were to stop creating content, then the group of people investing their time will likely dissipate as well. Related to this, The Apache Software Foundation considers the importance of one or a few committers to an open source software project to determine the health of a community. They call this the "bus" or "pony rule" — what if a bus were to take the few important members away? (See my tweet.)

An example of a sustainable community around written content would be fan fiction for Star Trek.

Github contributors become a community if a large enough mass of committers can sustain, or even direct a project even if the governing authority were to disappear. A great example of this is the Node.js community forking away from the community sponsors because they were unhappy with direction. See this article for latest status on this community drama.

Power users — if a group of users can, in and of themselves, create a sustainable community or organization without help or organization from the parent company of the product, they could be considered a community. An example of a very powerful one is ASUG (Americas SAP User Group). However, I believe that independent power user organizations are a construct that mostly formed pre-social media era.

Since social media era, most companies are creating their own power user "communities". These communities are not independent, but can be extremely large. Consider, for example, the SAP Community Network which is controlled by the company, but consists of well over 1 million users and implementors.

If the sponsoring company were to choose to pull the plug on this community, its possible it would have enough critical mass to reform under its own power, but in a severely limited way.

Everything described above is about critical mass of time, energy, community-owned content, and people. Very helpful is having renewable powerful forces of identity that would help potential community members identify that they should be part of this community — like people having children, or the involvement of institutions such as schools or churches.

Greg Chase
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