I’d like to keep improving the ways we describe Mozilla in general. It would be helpful to have some greater specificity around some key concepts we use regularly. “Community” is one such concept.
We talk about “community” at Mozilla all the time. A lot of other people talk about “community” as well. People use the word “community” to mean many different things. Sometimes “community” is used to describe a coherent, structured group and sometimes a diffuse, permeable set of people.
To get greater specificity I started with dictionaries and encyclopedias. The Wikipedia discussion of “community” is very long, and has many sub-parts to it. At first I thought it was too complex to be helpful. But as I’ve started talking more with people about the Mozilla identity and goals, I’ve come to think that some of the Wikipedia characterizations of different types of communities might actually be really useful. I’m about halfway through describing Mozilla communities and will post that as soon as it’s coherent.
If anyone has definitions of “community” they think are helpful to understanding Mozilla, please leave a pointer.