Like Wikipedia and Firefox, it's time to embrace the opportunity of community

Social scientists have grappled with the concept of community for at least 100 years, but it has gone through a renaissance recently. Community is about an individual’s sense of belonging to a wider collective, which is fundamental for humans. Community matters for organizations, too, if they aspire to instill a sense of belonging in their employees, partners, and other stakeholders. Henry Mintzberg, an influential management scholar and professor, has repeatedly called for the rebuilding of companies into communities where people feel they are contributing to something bigger than themselves. He advocates “communityship”, a hybrid form of individual and collective leadership based on committed, distributed exchange between an organization’s members. The rise of social technologies has made interacting and organizing online easier. Some organizations have adopted unique community-based designs – think…