I love this post because your sentiment is beautiful Dave, as what shines through is your genuine care for the inclusion of every individual in the potential community, and that is an outstanding trait in education. 🙂

I’m trying to think of a real world example where membership of a community doesn’t come with some pre-membership baggage of existing community to navigate. Are there ever any 100% fresh pop-up community experiences? In offline communities, there is also already a shared language, a history – like starting a new school, a new job or moving to a new neighbourhood, or even a new country – or even going to a conference. Even in new communities there usually isn’t a 100% share Day 1.

Navigating communities is very hard – fraught with horrible emotions sometimes and you can feel very outside of the community for a very very long time. You can also find your place and then inexplicably feel lost again for a time. Same with online?

I just think that you could spend a lot of time trying to scaffold all the welcomeness in the world, trying hard to ensure everyone feels like they have real membership, so that they they don’t feel like they are missing some background. In doing that, trying to smooth those transitions, is that making an artificial community?

Sometimes joining a community is smooth, and other times bumpy. Sometimes you try and just don’t get that sense of belonging, so you disengage. That very act of overcoming that feelings of being outside, feeling lost, feeling threatened, or being offended, or feeling ignored – all of that – isn’t that just – real? Yes, facing those aspects put people at risk for disengagement – and this can sometimes be extreme. Disengagement can be a dark place to be where having individuals reach out from the community can help you back in. However, the conscious decision to rally against feeling disengaged, to pursue belonging, to ask for an outreached hand – for help – for information – for explanation – and to keep hold of the desire to belong – despite feeling lost -that has to come from the individual?

Scaffolding your own belonging in an open community – could it be seen as a digital literacy skill that you have to work at and develop and fail at sometimes too? Could you turn the ‘we’ and ‘them’ around from feeling like a problem or responsibility of the community to somehow empower individuals to navigate it?