The 4 Elements of Community – Part 2 – Influence

26 April 2011 by Greg Lexiphanic | 1 Comment

Continuing the series in defining community for 2011, this is part 2. You can catch up by reading the introduction — Community: building a definition for 2011 — and part 1 — Membership.

As discussed in the introductory post, a sense of community has 4 main elements:

Membership
Influence
Fulfilment
Shared emotional connection

As a community member, you can feel a sense of membership but there needs to be more than that if you’re going to have a sense of community.

The second of the four elements that form a sense of community is influence.

Influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development or behaviour of something. For a sense of community, it means that someone has the ability to have an effect on the community itself. However, it goes in both directions: the community can also effect the character, development or behaviour of an individual member.

This bidirectional influence might appear to be contradictory but, in fact, works together in both directions simultaneously.

“People who acknowledge that others’ needs, values, and opinions matter to them are often the most influential group members, while those who always push to influence, try to dominate others, and ignore the wishes and opinions of others are often the least powerful members.”
—McMillan & Chavis, 1986

How can we identify influence within a community?

Identifying influence in a community can be tough at first, until you know what you’re looking for. To help understand it better, in a 1996 paper McMillan reviewed the definition of a sense of community from the original paper he published with Chavis a decade earlier. In that review, he reshuffled the elements slightly. Influence became something described as trust. If you spot trust within a community, there’s a good chance there’s a relationship with influence.

Here are some ways that influence works in communities:

Conformity: a group will always encourage new members to conform to its practices, in part to validate their membership and in part to establish and maintain group norms. By constantly practicing these norms, new members will see these and will, in the interest of demonstrating to other members that they belong to the community, be influenced by these practices and conform to them.

In academic circles, this might be called “consensual validation”: people need to know that they aren’t the only ones thinking and experiencing certain things, and so will seek feedback and reassurance from others. This ends up validating members and reinforcing group norms. The fun part is that if existing members of a community see new members copying their practices, the existing members feel validated. Yes, that may seem a bit backward but people do weird things just to be validated.

We can also look at this from the angle of trust: copying the behaviour of others is a common method for building trust not just among humans but also in the animal kingdom. I’m reminded of how Dian Fossey imitated the behaviour of the mountain gorillas she studied so as to get closer to them.

Changing minds: sometimes this might be as simple as being able to express your opinion and have another person not just acknowledge your argument but also change their opinion because of it. For this to work, a community needs to be flexible enough to allow some individual expression. A member may discover a better way of doing things but needs to have the room to experiment with and demonstrate it. As others see the benefit, the member who devised the improvement will have thus influenced them and this will increase his chances of influencing others again in the future.

Pooling influence: a single person may be able to change everyone’s mind but, more frequently, it requires members to pool their influence to bring about change within a community. Those larger changes might be about voting within a community to change something that affects everyone: a change in focus; a new method; a change of meeting place; ejecting a troll. In Twitter’s early days, someone suggested the @ symbol to designate a reply. It was adopted by other users and eventually became a common practice among the community. The adoption of this technique by the majority of users silently influenced the company to incorporate it as a feature of the platform.

Influencing as a community: the community as a whole can have influence, too, over those outside it. This pooled influence is gained through a quantity of members and what influence they wield individually. Together, they can influence others in ways they otherwise cannot. The union movement is a good example of how this works.

An atmosphere of influence: another thing to consider is that, sometimes, just the belief that you can influence the community can be enough. As long as evidence of past influence and the *potential* for future influence are both present and visible — in other words there’s an “atmosphere” for influence to occur — a sense of community can flourish. However, this can be used nefariously. The claim “we listened to customers” is used as a marketing technique to encourage potential customers to trust the company and its products.
Success from this, however, is inevitably short-lived if opportunity for future influence fails to arrive.

Let’s expand our definition of community a little more again. As you’ll probably be able to figure out, it needs to include all four elements of a sense of community.

Following this discussion of influence, we now have:

Community is a group of people who feel like they belong to something and can influence and be influenced by one another.

Getting closer, eh? Starting to sound like a real definition now.

Next time: Fulfilment

What are some ways you’ve seen influence at work in a community? Share your experiences in the comments.