About Project Diktuon » Community Draft II

Community Draft II

Having talked with some people about the Diktuon.net I tought the idea of different subcommunities for different languages might be a good idea.

Project Diktuon is all about “building a community.” Both words are used to refer to two slighly I use the word a bit ambiguously to mean two slightly different things.

First, I sometimes refer excplicitely to the community of all those people contributing to Project Diktuon, whether they know they do so or not. This community is not very tight, and many people only know a handful of others. Ultimately the aim of Project Diktuon is to build this community.

Second, I usually use the word community just to refer a subset of that community: the members of Diktuon.net and its subcommunities.

Subcommunities

Europe is special. At the same time it is a tightly packed large region of people with many things in common, while at the same time these people are divided into several heterogenous peoples, who have their very own strong identities. One of the things that sets these peoples apart is the multitude of languages they use. This means that not all people belonging to this large community can use their native language. At the same time, most of the people they relate to, belong to the community of their native language.

Diktuon.net in itself is little more than a technical framework to help build the Europe-wide community. But that community comprises of the regional communities of various languages. Therefore it is sensible create separate social networking services for these various regions and languages, but with unifieduser management.

There are some major pros and cons in this approach. On the upside, as the user management would still be unified, user database still being handled as a totality, Diktuon.net could still provide services to all of these networks, for example maintaining the general infrastructure, taking care of user and login management, running the servers, hosting websites, managing emails, and developing other common services,such as security and chat.

Second, each of these communities could customize their own networking service to match their needs. Not only do people in Italy and in Finland speak different languages, but the cultures in these places are different as well. The issues and codes of conduct are different. Providing these communities separate social networking sites would allow them to customize them to fit to their own needs. However, as their userbase is part of the Diktuon.net userbase, their critiria for the users should not be less than it is for Diktuon.net in general.

One of these differences in the communities is the extent to which security is implemented. I have a vision that I should build a high security, high privacy site for a high quality international community. However, as security and usability tend to be mutually exclusive, I understand this would be a bit of an overkill for most people, who could settle for bit less security.

On the negative side, these networking sites would not be easily synchronised. While it is possible that one person belongs to several different communities, his actions in those communities would not be visible in other communities. In some cases this might not be a problem, as most of those communities use different languages and most of the actions are language specific, this would cause some issues. For example, it might not be useful for an international community to read what I say in Finnish, but I might want to share my friends list between different communities.

Second, this means significantly more work. When each of the communities would use their own settings, all of those settings would need to be taken care of by the members of those communities. This means that each community needs tech savvy people who can maintain and develop the service to their own needs. These people can of course co-operate between the different communities.

Ultimately, for an everyday user, taking part in several distinct communities takes effort. As these communities can have subcommunities – groups – withing themselves, they should be used whenever possible. The number of subcommunities should be kept to minimum. I think a community for each country and one international community would be fine.

Members

It should be noted that there is a third community between the people who contribute to Project Diktuon and the users of Diktuon.net: people, who contribute to Project Diktuon and are associated with Diktuon.net, but who are not registered members. These people share the same Spirit as the folks in here and may follow what’s going on at Diktuon.net and use it’s public services (like reading this) and may be in touch with registered members, but who for some reason have not (yet) joined themselves.

Being a member of Diktuon.net means two things.

First, you are a member of an association and in many practical ways have to get along with the others. In associations important issues are decided together and financial burden is shared among its members.

Before you even think about applying, you should read carefully everything written on this site, the association rules and get to know at least some of the members.

Second, you get an user account at Diktuon.net and can use Internet services it provides. You can start cooking the Stone Soup.

Building the Community

By “building the community” withing the context of Diktuon.net, we mean “building the bigger community by building the smaller community”.

When building the smaller community, the bigger community is built in two ways:

Directly, as those people are part of the larger community, and building that community is building the bigger community and

Indirectly, as the members and communites in the smaller are built and then they act as parts of the larger community.

The idea is to build people and the community primarily in quality and only then in quantity.

There are many ways to build the smaller community. First, sharing from our own hearts so that each of us may grow in knowing God. Second, weaving the networks between people in the smaller community and by encouraging them sharing and co-operating, thereby tightening the community. And third, growing the size of the community by inviting and discipling more people to the smaller community.

When people and communities built around Diktuon.net enter the larger context, they can for one disciple Christians, build unity among Christians, share the gospel of Christ to unbelievers, and do whatever it is God wants them to do – using the Diktuon.net resources and strengthened by the community around Diktuon.net.