On the surface, community seems like a fairly straight forward concept. It is vital to the success of sites like ERE so it should be worth a quick exploration. As Yvonne LaRose�recently pointed out when she was a guest on this blog,�community is a place where people with common interests can mingle and support one another. A place that creates some form of unity.

If we come at this from the point of view of the culture of the members we can see that one group's idea of community might well be different from another's.�The Well is a well known online community�but it is very�much�different from The�Rotary Club.�

In the context of the individualistic, future-forward 'Western World' a community may be conceived as a collection of individuals coming together to pursue their own personal aims through cooperation with others. Membership in the community amplifies the power of the individual. Even if there is a degree of compromise on aims the individual can achieve much more inside the group, as opposed to doing it himself. How many individuals could put an end to a disease as the Rotary Club is close to doing with Polio?

In very few communities do people pretend that they are doing it purely for the 'Community' or the group. At best,�communities express enlightened self-interest, at worst naked self-interest masquerading as cooperation. Most communities that we belong to combine both strands. The enlightened community tends to survive and the self-interest community eats itself alive or changes into another form that is aligned with its members needs.

And In The East....

In China, online communities are rare and almost exclusively for the one-child policy generation, the China equivalent of Generation Y.

For this generation most interaction is online and community is just an extension of what they are doing already; blogging, emailing and sending SMSs. Some individuals seem to experience a sense of community from this kind of interaction but�the feeling�is really just the product of multiple one-two-one communication channels. Few people actually come together to form a real�community, and when they do it is usually built around business issues.

The barriers to the creation of a real community in China seem�to stem from a�basic shyness among professionals in China and a lack of familiarity with honest peer to peer communications with anyone other than family and school friends. There is a strong sense of not wanting to stick out. Even by email. The one-child policy is a big factor as this tends to create isolated individuals that further feeds the issues above.

Of course, at the same time there are forces working in the opposite direction. An initial discussion in my office generated some interesting results. The preferred modus operandi in China is to avoid failure at all costs so the focus was on why communities would eventually work.

Specifically, people cited some reasons for optimism:

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Frank Mulligan is the�Managing Director of�Talent Software, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider based in Shanghai, China. He has lived in China for over 10 years and in a previous life worked in executive search. His community will be centred around the needs of HR people. Frank is an optimist.