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Christmas carols and community spirit
17 December 2009
By Tennie Videler
Last night I went out carol singing with my children and a whole lot of neighbours. So what was a Dutch atheist with extremely limited singing abilities doing singing carols for charity in a sleepy English village? And why am I writing about it here?
Well, my reason for joining in was for community building- we have moved to a small village about a year ago. Much as we made the move because of the more affordable house we have found the sense of village community a total boon. So I had a fun time with my neighbours, froze my fingers off, wore antlers and met some new people.
All if which made me think: what could be the digital equivalent of carol singing? (or going to the pub, which my neighbours and I find very community building, for that matter). What could we be doing to make this blog even more of a community?
‘On the first day of Christmas’, everyone…?
Sarah Davies21 December 2009 at 11:48 AM
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My own sense is that - despite the wonders of twitter, facebook and all the rest of Web2.0 - any community continues to rely on face to face interactions as a base for online relationships. In other words, online stuff works best when there is at least some non-online contact involved: we treat people better when we've actually met them, rather than know them as words on a page. So maybe some region-specific get togethers could work? An evening at the pub, or at a restaurant? (Carol singing optional...)
Matthew Salois21 December 2009 at 05:18 PM
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I would like to see user profiles! Being able to attach research interests and career profiles to those making blog posts would be really useful. I see the names of the writers, but I struggle to attach a meaningful "face" to those names. If we would like to expand the networking power of this blog, having profiles would go a long way.
Deborah Conte21 December 2009 at 08:59 PM
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I agree with Matthew re: profiles and career info. I could see that expanding into something akin to the "networking sites" for researchers discussed in an eariler blog post. Actually, this may in fact be a great idea - I think that a function like that supported by somethign such as Vitae, already known as such a great resource would be a very good thing indeed. Of course I am sure that it would require an enormous amount of work from the website programmers...
Elizabeth Dodson21 December 2009 at 11:30 PM
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Totally agree - profiles would be a great way to identify shared interests and to give posters some meaningful identity - which will then help us to pick each other out if we attend future research staff development conferences and events!