If you want to understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house. Networks connect; communities care.
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- [note::What a great heuristic: "Networks connect, communities care"]

Marshall McLuhan wrote famously about the “global village”, created by new information technologies.
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A century or two ago, the word community “seemed to connote a specific group of people, from a particular patch of earth, who knew and judged and kept an eye on one another, who shared habits and history and memories, and could at times be persuaded to act as a whole on behalf of a part.” In contrast, the word has now become fashionable to describe what are really networks, as in the “business community”—“people with common interests [but] not common values, history, or memory.”3
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- [note::YES. Just because you call yourself a "community", doesn't mean you're a community.]

Does this matter for dealing with the global problems of this world? You bet it does. In his New York Times column in 2012, Thomas Friedman reported asking an Egyptian friend about the protest movements in that country: “Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not to collaborate,” he replied. Friedman added that “at their worst, [social media] can become addictive substitutes for real action.”4 That is why, while the larger social movements (in Cairo’s Tahrir Square or on Wall Street) may raise consciousness about the need for renewal in society, it is the smaller social initiatives, usually developed by small groups in communities, that do much of the renewing
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We make a great fuss about leadership these days, but communityship is more important. Successful leaders create, enhance, and support a sense of community in their organization, and that requires hands-on management. Beyond an excessive focus on the individual is recognition of the collective nature of effective enterprise.
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