On community and ownership
Or why communities are own by harmonized partners
In my last post, I wrote about the relationship between order and community. In short, relationships are the atomic unit of community and we should engineer how they harmonize.
Today I will address one of the biggest challenges of community building, and one of the key structures underlying their nature: ownership.
Some time ago, the Latin philosopher Cicero said that “a republic is a thing of the people”1. In the original the text says “res publica” and “res populi”: “the public affair” is “a thing of the people”.
For the sake of my text, let me interchange the term “republica” or “public affair” for “community”. In this context, they are close synonyms. “Community is a thing of the people”.
The first thing that jumps to our eyes is the genitive case. Ok, maybe it jumped only to my eyes… but please, bear with me, I promise this nerd detour will make sense in a moment.
In Latin, the genitive is the case of possession and characteristics of a given thing. So, when Cicero says that a community is a thing of the people (res populi) he is telling us that “a community is property of its people”. The people that have relationships inside a community owns the community.
This is the first conclusion that matters here. All the communities are own by those with relationships inside them.
But… what kind of relationships?
I’ll return to the ownership per se in a moment, but to answer this question let me address now the idea of “the people”.
Of course a community is not the property of “any people” or “all the people”. That would be stupid. There must be a unifying factor that brings together these people, right? There must be a cohesive element that amalgamates those relationships in a coherent order.
This element is the free agreement of the people to pursue a common goal. Being said that, we can say that a community is own only by all the people that are organized based on a common agreement and towards a common good.
What agreement? Doesn’t really matter the specifics, as long as it’s honoured. What common good? The same, it’s not about the concrete good, as long as it’s commonly pursued.
Let me be clear, these common goods and common agreements are not only fancy, difficult and refined things. Having fun or sharing music tips can be a common agreement; learning music theory and consuming dank memes can be common goods.
The important thing is to ensure all the relationships inside the community are ordered towards those goods. Everybody agrees to pursue those goods. While they do this, they are part and they own their community. And by doing so gain rights and privileges (i.e. enjoy the goods attained) and freely receive responsibilities (behave according to the community rules).
We can see this in many examples, from Reddit and Discord communities, to even cities and states.
Now that we understand that “people” means something specific here, I can return to the core of the ownership.
When a group of people agree to pursue common goods they become a new thing: they stop being unrelated beings or unconnected nodes and become something new.
I will call them, provisionally, partners because partners are those that follow each other and together pursue a goal.
What I find interesting about this is the colloquial association between ownership and partnership. A community is co-owned by those that “walk together” towards a shared goal.
One great example of this is the gaming communities where disymbol players agree to some rules in order to achieve something, let’s say: finish the game in the less possible time.
In a community, the partners are called members. This is because the word member conveys much more meaning. What is a member but a living part, a limb, of a bigger, unitary, organized organism? Partners associate. Members belong.
Now… you could claim that all this theoretical rambling is somewhat fine, but community building is something more practical. And you’d be right. Yet, I believe that by understanding these elements we can tackle the biggest and most important challenges of community building.
One of these challenges lies in the very core of the ownership. The past June 23th David Spinks wrote a Twitter thread about how the dynamics differ for community builders and content creators.
In one tweet he stated:
Based on what I’ve been writing here, I’d propose to change the word “feel” for the word “are”. Communities are owned by their members. But the ownership is not merely commercial, as we discussed. It’s -allow me the vanity- ontological.
And by understanding it, we may be able to disentangle the challenge of perception of value and its resultant economic threats for community builders.
Community builders and creators inside the same community indeed have different roles and different capabilities. And these differences mold how they are perceived and how they can develop inside their community.
And in the face of these differences and their impacts, one could feel the temptation of overlooking or simplifying them or accepting their impacts as unavoidable. I want to propose another route.
Yes, one can rightfully say that “community builders are creators too”. But I think this is only a nugget of truth.
I’d propose to reframe it as follows: both, community members and creators are members. But they are a different kind of members, and to protect the community we need to protect each kind of membership to consolidate the attainment of their common good.
How to do that? I will propose that subsidiarity is the how. But, I’ll do it next week.
Cicero, De Republica I, 39
Build the agreement with the members... Love it.