The City - Location, Location, Location

One of the design principles of The City, which has guided virtually every decision we’ve made, is that the physical is more important than the virtual. This subtle but significant difference provides the foundation for understanding how this new thing is going to work.

A natural question would be why we emphasize the physical so much, I mean, isn’t this the internet, isn’t the medium inherently “virtual”? The power of the internet (that it is a globally prevalent platform for Technology) can also become it’s weakness if we eliminate the possibility of _local_ community. Let me explain this with an example.

On my Facebook page, I’ve got dozens of friends. Of those friends, I would imagine that about one third are actually in the Seattle area. The other two thirds are people literally all over the world. While there is a certain cool factor in having a virtual Rolodex of everyone I’ve ever known, is there anything more to it than that? Sure, if I’m planning a trip out to one of the areas where they will be, it’s rather convenient, and I get to find out that my college friend is eating a ham sandwich (a la Twitter), but that doesn’t change my life or their life for that matter. When you’re trying to build an intentional community, Facebook just doesn’t cut it. There are too many off topic, off mission sorts of diversions that the game aspect of the site dominates any mission it could try to carry.

Now, Facebook can be incredibly missional for the 1% that choose to use it as a mission field and network specifically with that in mind, but I’m trying to think along the lines of how you get the 80% to that level. The framework will either make a compelling community, or it will not. I don’t believe Facebook ever will do that for the 80%.

Ok, so why local community? Why build an application that is so “limited” to just the physical communities that people are a part of? Isn’t there a huge benefit to a large network? There certainly is! But I believe we need to be selective in matching the right strengths to the right problem, and not inheriting the weaknesses along the way. So we’re trying to make The City all about small communities, but massively leverage the benefits of being apart of a large network.

For instance, we just made a major change to our Members’ site. This is a site which formerly was an all-church forum (2000+ people participating). While it was very cool that so many people were on it, it also led to a nasty Pareto-like problem…about 5% of the people dominated the platform, and the other 95% didn’t participate. Well, that’s not community! So we made a change so that forums are now organized around the physical campus, so each member participates in a forum designed for just their campus, and participation has gone up quite a bit. I’m seeing many more names that have never posted before, now comfortable to participate in these smaller communities which are still part of a singular larger community.

So the next step with The City is to move even closer to where community happens…in every single small gathering where a member of attendee of a Mars Hill campus is involved. I’ll explain more in the next post.