The community of practice definitions are very helpful. In the follow up post I”ve written I borrowed the wikipedia definition, in part because it’s a general reference, but I like these definitions.

I also like blizzard’s comment that communities are groups of people that depend on each other.

I’m most of the way through Clay Shirky’s _Here Comes Everybody_ which is all about collaborative communities, and may help frame your thinking, if you’re interested in someone else attempting to do that.

In the part I’m at now, he’s talking about the three characteristics of successful communities:

- The promise. The reason people are drawn to the community, and interested in becoming members.
- The tools. What it is about the community that enables its members to communicate, collaborate, and produce; how it works around the organizational and oversight requirements that used to require a corporate structure.
- The bargain. What community members expect of each other and will have expected of them.

His prose is a bit repetitive at times, as he tries to drive his messages home, but he got me with one quote on a randomly leafed-to page (paraphrased):

“It used to be that we did big things for money and small things for love. Even a barn raising is a reasonably small thing, and a community that takes care of each other can do that without a profit motive. But the costs of building an encyclopedia are too big to do for love, money must be involved to overcome the friction. Now, though, we have unprecedented abilities to collaborate in a distributed way with less friction. We can do big things for love.”

This was good, but lead to a realisation that contractually there was no clear definition of who the users were, so a user agreement was constructed and is being rolled out (click on link). A side effect of this - to get to the point - is that this provides a definition of Community. Those who are agreed are part of the Community and those who do not not agree are not. (For those who are not, there is a separate “open source” style licence that gives them permission to use but not to rely.)

Mozilla might be able to define its community around a similar concept of entering into an agreement; there is some sense in this as Mozilla is also in a relationship with the users that is likewise impacted by certificates. More likely however you are thinking on the developers+producers, not the end-users.

In short: maybe a document or agreement can be crafted that defines those who want to be part of the Community?

Although this might sound like legal blah blah, it doesn’t need to be. I.e., the above-mentioned agreement also incorporates a set of higher, softer principles; Mozilla already has a Manifesto, so maybe the Community is simply those who agree with the Manifesto?

(Disclaimer: I’m involved with the CA as auditor, etc etc.)

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (from Cultivating Communities of Practice, by Etienne Wenger et al).

Snappier version:

“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/).