The Community Builder Guidebook

Julian Stodd is a writer, researcher, artist, and explorer. His work explores the context of the Social Age, a place where technology has evolved what it means to be human. His work typically exists at the intersection of systems: Social Leadership, Social and Collaborative Learning, and views of Culture, Innovation, and Change held more as social movements than structural affairs. Julian has written seventeen books and works to a principle of #WorkingOutLoud, sharing iterations every day and frequently finding new ways to be wrong.

This short Guidebook is an exploration of 'Communities'. It considers the key capabilities of the Social Leader as a Community Builder. It's about the communities that we build for Social Learning, that we engage with as Social Leaders, and that we will rely upon as we build our more Socially Dynamic Organisation.It is intended to be both a space for thoughtful exploration, and a practical guide as to how you do it in practice. I've written it to help you to create the 'Conditions for Community': to support your work, whether it be to build new communities, to help existing ones grow and thrive, or to ensure that allof our communities are inclusive and interconnected. 'Interconnectivity' is a core feature of the Socially Dynamic Organisation.The context of this work is the Social Age: the evolved ecosystem in which we live (and the subject of another of these Guidebooks). Broadly speaking, the Social Age sees the rise of collectivism beyond traditional Organisational structures, facilitated by emergent and pervasive social collaborative technology, at radical scale, and existing outside the hierarchy of any formal organisational structure or rules. The communities that I describe here are not formal structures; they exist within the Social aspect of the Organisation.