I’m in the lobby of a hotel in Portland, Oregon, as delegates for Museums and the Web 2013 start arriving. It’s two years since I first attended this conference; the first conference I had ever been to in my life and a major career catalyst for me. Sitting here, I naturally find myself reflecting on the changes that have happened in my life since I first came into this community. I’ve often described the sensation as “finding my tribe” but, to be honest, at that point the museum tech community wasn’t my tribe. I didn’t share the language or get the jokes. I hadn’t met anyone in the sector, so I stood on the edges of a community and looked in.
That this situation has changed so significantly in such a short period of time often leaves me wondering what it was that allowed me – an outsider – to find myself and a place within this sector. What is it that makes a community and gives it meaning? And how do newcomers find their way into a community? In 1986, David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis George proposed a definition of community that included the following characteristics:
The first element is membership. Membership is the feeling of belonging or of sharing a sense of personal relatedness. The second element is influence, a sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group and of the group mattering to its members. The third element is reinforcement: integration and fulfillment of needs. This is the feeling that members’ needs will be met by the resources received through their membership in the group. The last element is shared emotional connection, the commitment and belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, and similar experiences.
This seems like a pretty usable definition, except that I didn’t have any of these characteristics when I first came along. I didn’t feel like I had membership in the group, although I quickly became interested in becoming a member. Nor did I have influence or shared emotional connections. What I did have, however, was the good fortune of meeting people who both implicitly and explicitly invited me to become part of their discussions.
The implicit invitations could be as simple as allowing me to sit at a table with people whom I hadn’t met although they had long-standing and existing relationships; the openness of people to have a conversation and share something of themselves and their thoughts with me. The explicit invitations came from people like Koven Smith, who invited me to be part of his panel on the point of museum websites at MCN2011. I became a member of the group because I was invited by existing members to join their conversations, and given the opportunity to learn and contribute. In so doing, I started to have an understanding of the shared language and became to have an emotional connection that started to tie strongly to the community.
But inviting one person to be part of a conversation or a community isn’t particularly hard. The community borders can stretch and morph as small groups enter and exit whilst still maintaining their stability; the shared conventions and language. But is it possible to invite a significant number of new people to join an existing community and still keep a sense of internal congruity? Or, in other words, is it possible to grow a community at scale or even to have community at scale? I’m not sure that it is, but I think it’s an interesting problem for museums to be thinking about. Are museums naturally limited in the size and scope of their communities – those who have an intimate relationship with the institution and the people who are associated with it?
I’d love to know your thoughts. When have you joined a community, and what made that possible? And do you think it’s possible for large numbers of people to join a community in a short period of time, or does that threaten the self-defining nature of the community itself?
museum geek 
“Are museums naturally limited in the size and scope of their communities?” This is a really interesting and complex question!
I think they are, but I also suspect that the kind of communities museums (seek to) cultivate are fundamentally different in kind from the communities represented by the museum technology community (say). If I go to a museum, even as a member and avid online follower (I’m thinking of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ‘my’ museum, though not the one where I work), I certainly care about and affiliate with the museum, but I’m not sure that I necessarily feel a sense of community with the other members or visitors. We’re all at the museum, but does that mean we have a sense of personal relatedness? I’m not so sure.
I guess I’d be curious to further unpack what community means (I can’t help parsing words, sorry, I’m a former linguist and a current editor! Gah!), as well as how museums seek to cultivate it. My perception is that many organizations seek to cultivate community around the organization itself rather than around the values or objects that the organization embodies, and I question the sustainability and appeal of that strategy.
Hi Annelisa. Sorry I didn’t reply sooner. I’ve been thinking about your comment however, and trying to decide whether I agree that musetech communities and the communities museums seek to cultivate are fundamentally different, or if they should be. And even with a week or so to ponder this question, I don’t know that I have a good answer.
Having said that, I’m spending some time at the Dallas Museum of Art this week, and one of the things I’ve really started to concentrate on is the nature of community, and how communities come together and stay together. What bonds people? Because I agree. Just being at a museum with other people doesn’t necessarily engender a sense of community with other visitors, or with the institution and the people who work there itself.
But what does? To look at the above ideas, these notions of relatedness (having something to pin membership of the group onto; something shared between members), a sense that membership matters (maybe a sense that you are part of creating something that doesn’t exist in the same way if you aren’t in it), and the fulfillment of needs. So how does a museum enable the creation of a community in or around its activities or programs? Or is it more just about tapping into existing communities, and bringing them into the museum and therefore giving them space and a place to be? I don’t know yet, but I’d like to figure it out.
What do you think community means?
Also it’s in French (some Google translate help would be required ;)), I suggest you read my post earlier this week about the French #museogeeks community. Also less personal, more of a “archeological” attempt, you might find a few interesting insights about joining a community : http://dasm.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/qui-sont-les-museogeeks/.