The word community is increasingly being used as a broad term defining a group of individuals interacting on a particular online platform, these “communities” are thriving on websites like YouTube, Flickr and the countless blogs abounding on the internet.
This new phenomena has precipitated a plethora of opinions on what communities are, and what they can be used for. Some strive to emulate the positive and powerful community of Wikipedia, now the single most significant repository of knowledge in human history (possibly excepting the Library of Congress) created by community of individuals dedicated to writing, editing and validating articles ostensibly altruistically.
Particularly important is the promise of a feature allowing us to tap into communities to achieve business results, and there is a growing band of people employed to think about this very issue.
Successful community engagement promises insight for marketing, sales, employee engagement, productivity, strategy and planning, to name only a few. So how should the modern organisation go about leveraging off the concept of community? And what value can these communities actually deliver to these businesses?
The first step in understanding the power of communities is to understand what a community actually is.
So WTF is legal agency?
In Commercial Law an agent is someone who has the power to act on behalf of a principal and can bind a principal to their decisions and actions, typically in the course of employment. A good example of an agent acting on behalf of a principal is a shop attendant contracting with customers for the sale and purchase of goods in a shop.
It’s legally interesting because the goods sold do not belong to the shop assistant.
The principle of agency is a very important one in modern law, particularly considering corporations are defined as “fictitious legal persons”, and can only ever act as principals through the agency of real people.
The legal concepts supporting the formation of agency and the rights and obligations that agents and principals have and confer are complicated but this should be enough to apply the idea of agency to the relationship between genes and the organisms they construct.
Genes and organisms as principals and agents
All eukaryotes (a group including all animals, plants and fungus) are built by the instructions contained within the nucleus of the cell. These instructions are catalogued by DNA and written in genes and the relationship between genes and the eukaryotic organisms they build is a form of agency.
The genes act as principals and dictate the starting point for their agent’s life but then submit responsibility to those organisms for continued existence.
The gene-principals retain control over their organism-agents and instil a strong desire to find food, safety and a mate; however, the relationship between genes and organisms is one of strict agency and there are no circumstances where a gene-principal can escape the action of an organism-agent.
Genes are bound completely by the actions of organisms.
The story of a lonely albatross
A black browed albatross, dubbed Albert, has been visiting the shores of Great Britain in search of a mate. It is thought he was blown off course from his natural home in the South Atlantic 40 years ago and despite being unequipped by biology to cope with his new environment has acted as a faithful agent to return every year, again and again, to a long and lonely coast.
12,000 km from his ancestral home: Albert will live out his days single and notwithstanding another fateful accident will take his genes with him to a desolate grave.
The human condition
The relationship between human-agents and our principals is of an order of magnitude more complicated than the rest of our eukaryotic cousins combined.
Although gene-agents encourage our love of fatty foods and we are attracted to individuals who signal “health”; there are examples of human actions running contrary to the interests of our gene-principals.
In fact we can separate out our behaviour into actions that support and those that go against the reproductive goals of our principal-genes.
Actions supporting the goals of our genes include:
- An act that ensures our own survival up to the end of our reproductive years
- An act that ensures the survival of close family up to the end of their reproductive years (the closer the relationship genetically the more important this becomes)
- An act that increases the likelihood of reproductive success (everything from impressing potential partners - to the act itself)
Actions detracting from the goals of our genes include:
- Offering any assistance to others we are not genetically related to
- Taking a vow of chastity
- Enlisting in the military
Humans act as agents of our genes when we take actions that support our gene’s reproductive success.
This then leaves the question:
When humans are not acting as agents for our genes who or what are we acting as agents for?
A new definition for community
The simple answer to the question is: when humans are not acting as agents for our genes, we are acting as agents for other principals. These principals use us in the same way our genes do, as agents ensuring their own reproduction, and in the modern age of global communication, are replicating like never before.
We can now define a community as any principal other than our genes that use us as agents to reproduce.
This definition combined with a job building high value online platforms should remind us not to concentrate on building attractive communities, but instead focus on building infectious ones.