[Community Communication Project]

The Community Communication Project is an attempt to find better ways for communities to interact, to share information -- to communicate. Ideally, this would lead to the identification or discovery of a model (a group of principles or structures) that could scale to fit a particular size community (say, a campus or a neighborhood or a city and so on). Imagine trying to solve a community problem and being able to tie into the most appropriate, effective, and efficient modes of communication you need: whether printed newsletters and flyers, video and television, web and email, facilitated group meetings, radio and telephone, personal contact, and so on.

Imagine developing a comprehensive, or unified, way for our communities to communicate: to communify who we are, where we are.

While there are several pieces already available and some already in use, the puzzle still hasn't been pieced together into a comprehensive picture. It is exactly that picture we seek. The slogan I return to again and again is "Our community is content-rich, but distribution-poor." Share the wealth.


ccp diagram

Introduction

Monday, August 14, 2006

Manifesto (the first draft)

Communication is essential to how we learn to live with each other.

There are as many ways to communicate as there are people. Indeed, there are more ways than people.

Some methods of communication are known and understood. Some are known but not understood. And many aren't known at all.

Much as a community is composed of unique individuals sharing their gifts with each other, true immersive communication can be a synthesis of unique methods, applied in a comprehensive fashion.

A comprehensive approach to how a community communicates can lead to the use of efficient and effective tactics. These tactics can build up to form a strategy of how people can share with each other. This strategy should be able to scale with different sizes of communities, as well as provide recursive feedback for self-correction and accountability.

Each method or mode of communication must be studied, explored, applied, and shared. As well, each mode should have links to other modes, perhaps by developing a protocol or interface between multiple modes.

The modes encompass all of the existing ways we communicate, in addition to leaving room for the new modes that haven't been discovered yet.

This is a journey. Some maps may tell us about certain parts of the landscape, but most of the terrain ahead of us is unknown. This is a journey to help communities communicate. We are explorers on the brink of a revolutionary advance, but we seek more than fragmentary maps. We seek the globe: interconnected, lively, expressive, thoughtful, human.

Our communities are content-rich, but distribution-poor. Share the wealth.

Community
Communication
Project