Communities Have Gates

Just #WorkingOutLoud today to share some of the new illustrations around the Community Builder work. This work builds of that which i have previously published in the Community Guidebook. In this new iteration, i consider what we build our Communities with, and what we build them upon.

A central premise is that all Communities have boundaries, and hence gateways, and part of what we need to do as Community Builders is to understand how people pass through these.

The work starts by asking people to map their Landscape of Communities: you can do this for yourself, it only takes 15 minutes or so.

Start with yourself in the centre, then radiate out and sketch your different spaces, alongside a note of how formal, or social, each one is. If you like, you can annotate it to say how you found that Community, and also consider how much crossover there is between Communities (for example: ’family’ into ‘work’ may be low, but ‘Community of Practice’ into ‘Work’ would be high.