Community - It's not as fluffy as it sounds

I gave a presentation to the Catalyzing Collaboration organization on Friday about building a life sciences community in Chicago, and it’s been dwelling in my brain ever since.

Catalyzing Collaboration is a relatively new association looking to raise Chicago’s profile as a life sciences hub. There are a lot of organizations that do that, now and in the past, of course. Their approach is focused more on the people in the field rather than the companies or even the science. The idea is to bring together academics, investors and executives from Chicago area life sciences companies to share ideas ad resources.

The discussion overall was about building community. It was implied that we were talking about online community, but I suggested dropping that online part because it’s distracting. As soon as you use that word, you get all distracted with Twitter, Facebook etc. and miss the real point.

The whole presentation is called Building Community: Online or Otherwise and hosted (with audio) on Authorstream.

Basically, community is about harnessing self-interest toward a group goal, not about light and fluffy concepts like “helping each other”.

As a working definition, a community is a group of individuals who, for self-interested reasons, choose to work together for a larger goal.

That’s it.

This is certainly not a new idea. It’s a concept that is thousands of years old going back to the earliest agricultural societies. Agriculture is an incredibly labor intensive activity, particularly when you move beyond subsistence farming. Establishing irrigation networks, protection against animals and neighboring villages – all of that required a large group of people working together, but doing it for their own reasons.

community + self interest = irrigation

In our picture here, we have a group of people working on digging a canal for an irrigation system. The purpose is to bring water from a nearby river and deliver it to fields further away. On a broad level, that means better crop yields, higher income and a better lifestyle.

This picture has about 10 or 11 men working on a hot afternoon. Some are above the new canal with shovels breaking up the dirt. Others are down at the bottom scooping dirt into buckets, while others carry it off. There’s even the visionary leader, which I assume is that guy on the left not holding any tools who clearly has no intention of getting dirty today.

And this picture doesn’t show the whole group. These guys get to be in the picture and when it’s all done I’m sure they’ll be at the table of honor at the celebratory feast, but maybe off to the left their wives are preparing lunch or dinner meals. I’m sure their sons are making multiple trips to the well to bring fresh water so no one passes out from heat stroke. This is a small view of an entire village working together on a major project.

Not one of these guys in the picture is there because they want to build an irrigation system for the village. They’re there because they own farms on either side of this ditch and they want to get a more reliable water source to their fields.

Self interest.

The word “Community” sounds all light and fluffy, but the core is understanding and leveraging self interest toward a common goal.