Outline of community

Types of communities

Geographic and physical communities

• European Community - founded on March 25, 1957 by the signing of the Treaty of Rome
• Community council - tier of local government in Wales and Scotland
• Autonomous communities of Spain - Spain's fifty provinces are grouped into seventeen autonomous communities
• Communities, regions and language areas of Belgium -
• Local community - town, city, neighborhood, rural area, or any locale and everyone in it
• Unincorporated community - geographic area having a common social identity
• Residential community - small town or city, composed mostly of residents
• Intentional Community - planned residential community, usually of people that share personal and cultural values.
• * Cohousing - intentional community composed of private homes centered around a common house and other common facilities.
• * Ecovillage - intentional community formed with social, economic, and ecological sustainability as its goal.
• * Commune - intentional community where most resources are shared and there is little or no personal property
• * Monastery - community of monks practicing a religious discipline
• * Convent - community of clergy particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and, to a lesser degree, in the Anglican Church
• * World Brotherhood Colonies - idea for spiritual based intentional communities based on shared spiritual principles, begun by Paramahansa Yogananda

  Global community

• World community - global aspects of community from the perspective of governance and the humanities
• International community - global aspects of community from the perspective of governance and the humanities
• Global village - global aspects of community from the perspective of telecommunications

  Ideational or abstract communities

• Business community - total body of business people its relationships and interactions
• Religious community - total body of religious people its relationships and interactions
• Scientific community - total body of scientists, its relationships and interactions
• Epistemic community - those who accept one version of a story
• Discourse Community - users of a particular style of language
• Moral community - group of people drawn together by a common interest in living according to a particular moral philosophy
• Voluntary association - group of individuals who voluntarily enter into an agreement to accomplish a purpose
• Cooperative - group of persons who join together to carry on an economic activity of mutual benefit

  Associative communities

• Action - group of people organized to support a cause or bring about social change
• Circumstance - group of people bound together because of circumstances usually beyond their control
• Interest - group of people who share a common interest or passion
• Place - group of people bound together because of where they spend a continuous portion of their time
• Position - group of people who share a particular station in life
• Practice - group of people who choose to collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.
• Purpose - group of people who are going through the same process or are trying to achieve a similar objective

Cooperatives

• Housing cooperative - legal entity that owns real estate, usually one or more residential buildings
• Retailers' cooperative - network of retailers which employs economies of scale to get discounts from manufacturers and to pool marketing
• Consumers' cooperative - cooperative which employs economies of scale to get discounts from distributors
• Utility cooperative - public utility such as electric, water or telecommunications owned by its members
• Worker cooperative - business entity owned in part or exclusively by its workers

  Other

• Affinity group - small group of activists who work together on direct action
• Intentional community - planned residential community with a much higher degree of social interaction than other communities
• Learning community - cohort-based, interdisciplinary approach to higher education covering distinct fields of study
• Virtual community - See [|Virtual community section] below
• Web community -

  Actual communities

• Intentional communities
• Cooperatives

• Benchmark virtual communities
• Additional virtual community listings

• List of countries
• List of subnational entities

  Online communities

• Craigslist - centralized network of urban online communities, featuring free classified advertisements and forums sorted by various topics

  Community concepts, movements and schools of thought

• Affinity - in terms of sociology, refers to "kinship of spirit", interest and other interpersonal commonalities
• Cenobitic - monastic tradition that stresses community life as opposed to eremitic.
• Collective - group of people who share common interests, working together to achieve a common objective
• Collectivism - school of thought, antithetical to Individualism, in which the collective takes precedence over the individual
• Communitarianism - group of related but distinct philosophies advocating phenomena such as civil society
• Communitas - Latin noun for the spirit of community having significance in cultural anthropology and the social sciences.
• Community politics - movement in British politics to re-engage people with political action on a local level
• Community television - television stations that are owned and operated by communities rather than governments or corporations
• Consanguinity - quality of being descended from the same ancestor as another person
• Consensus decision-making - inclusive decision-making processes that accommodate even the minority
• Emergence - complex pattern formation from simpler rules
• Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft - terms introduced by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies to distinguish community from society
• Group - collection of people who share characteristics, interact and have a common identity
• Group dynamics - field of study within the social sciences that focuses on the nature of groups
• Imagined communities - concept that nations are socially constructed by the imaginations of people
• Internationalism - political movement which advocates cooperation between nations for the benefit of all
• Interpersonal relationship - connection, affiliation or association between two or more people
• Liminality - period of transition related to initiation, rite of passage or other entry into a group
• Meeting - two or more people coming together to have discussions or produce a predetermined output, often in a formalized way
• Meritocracy - form of government based on rule by ability rather than by wealth or other determinants of social position.
• Organization - formal group of people with one or more shared goals
• Organizational learning - area of knowledge that looks at how an organization learns and adapts
• Plenary session - part of a meeting when all members of all parties are in attendance
• Scientific Community Metaphor - approach in computer science to understanding and performing scientific communities
• Sense of community - look from the psychological perspective at how and why communities form and why people join them
• Small-group communication - communication in a context that mixes interpersonal communication interactions with social clustering
• Social capital - concept with a variety of inter-related definitions, based on the economic value of social networks
• Socialization - process by which people learn to adopt the behavior patterns of the community in which they live
• Solidarity - feeling or condition of unity based on common goals, interests, and sympathies among a group's members

  Academic subjects

• Community studies - academic discipline, drawing on sociology and anthropology with emphasis on ethnography
• Community psychology - use of the principles of psychology to understand how communities work
• Computational sociology - recently developed branch of sociology that uses computation to analyze social phenomena
• Cultural anthropology - field of anthropology comprising the holistic study of humanity
• Internet studies - emerging field of academia dealing with the interaction between the Internet and modern society
• Organizational Development - branch of Sociology that deals with how and why people organize themselves
• Philosophy of social science - scholarly elucidation and debate of accounts of the nature of the social sciences
• Rural sociology - field of sociology associated with the study of life in small towns and the country.
• Social geography - how society affects geographical features and how environmental factors affect society.
• Social philosophy - philosophical study of interesting questions about social behavior.
• Social sciences - groups of academic disciplines that study the human aspects of the world using scientific methods
• Sociocultural evolution - theories of cultural evolution and social evolution - describing how cultures and societies have developed over time
• Urban planning - discipline which deals with the development of metropolitan areas, municipalities and neighbourhoods

  Community development

• Community organizing - process by which people are brought together to act in common self-interest
• Community building - the more informal aspects of community development; the establishment, broadening and deepening of links between community members
• Community economic development - efforts to improve the material aspects of local communities
• Community development planning - Public participatory and usually interactive town or neighborhood planning and design
• Community practice - type of social work practice that focuses on community level interventions
• Community service - service that a person performs for the benefit of his or her local community

  Virtual community concepts

• Bulletin board system -
• Chat room - online site in which people can chat online
• Computer-mediated communication -
• Discourse community -
• Electronic mailing list - special usage of e-mail that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users
• Internet activism -
• Internet forum -
• Internet social network -
• Massively distributed collaboration -
• Motivations for Contributing to Online Communities -
• Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games
• Network of practice -
• Online deliberation -
• Social network -
• Social evolutionary computation -
• The Virtual Community -
• Usenet - distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name
• Virtual Community of Practice -
• Virtual Ethnography -
• Virtual reality -
• Web community -
• Web of trust -
• Wireless community projects - development of interlinked computer networks
• World Wide Web - global, read-write information space

Other community topics

• Global Ecovillage Network - global association of people and communities dedicated to living "sustainable plus" lives
• Communication - process of sending information to oneself or another - usually via a language
• Gathering place - phenomenal natural location crucial to culture and civilization
• Community Boards - community-based mediation program, established in 1976, in San Francisco, California - USA
• Community garden - small plots of land allocated to groups of people by some organization for collective gardening
• WELL - - one of the oldest virtual communities still online.
• The Farm - spiritual intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee - known informally as a hippie commune

  Community institutions

• Community college - educational institution providing post-secondary education
• Community foundations - institutions that pool donations into coordinated investments for grants
• Community - trade union in the UK

  Lists

Resources