Hybrid Commonweal Local Communities?

dotCommonweal blog

For eleven years from March 2006 until March 2017, Commonweal Magazine had a blog which was called the dotCommonweal blog.  This allowed contributors to provide many short articles that could not possibly have fit into the print magazine.  A fine example of some of those on healthcare by the pseudonymous Unagidon (he worked in healthcare) are found here:

UNAGIDON ON HEATHCARE AND CAPITALISM

Many contributors like Unagidon very patiently dialoged with those who commented on their articles. Anyone with a valid e-mail address could comment. Each contributor was the moderator of his own articles and could remove comments that were inappropriate. The blog developed a reputation for high quality conversations without the bad manners so frequently found in blog comments.  The blog developed into a community where the most frequent commenters came to know to each other online. A few even met when someone visited another city.

In March 2017 Commonweal completely remodeled its website.  They abolished the blog in favor of developing Commonweal Local Communities. While in theory the community of commenters was unlimited in size in practice it developed into a community only because many of the same people commented again and again. In the meantime Commonweal local communities had begun as a grassroots movement which had asked Commonweal to provide a way for subscribers to sign up for local communities.  Why have a blog community which was self limited to thirty to fifty people when one could have that many locations around the country each of which could develop into a community of thirty to fifty members from subscribers in that area.

a newCommonweal blog

The announcement of the demise of the old Commonweal blog occurred around March 4, 2017 and was effective on March 6, 2017.  All the people who had contributed comments began to discuss online what they wanted to do. We decided to start our own blog to continue what we had been doing on the dotCommonweal blog, and to that end began exchanging e-mails. Someone said they already had a blog site which could be readily adapted, It was in fact up and operating by March 9th! 

The newCommonweal blog (not its real name since it functions as a private blog not sponsored by Commonweal) allowed all its commenters to post as well as comment. Several contributors also joined the blog but most decided it was better not to get involved in something that might be seen as competition for Commonweal's new plans. The new blog decided early on not to try to recruit new members and seek publicity.  The newCommonweal blog continues to exist now with more than 1400 posts (just slightly under one per day) for more than four years! This post as well as the three recent ones on this site are examples of what might be seen on the blog. They are all develop from posts that I had were published there.

The Cleveland Commonweal Local Community

On March 6, 2017 I signed up on the Commonweal website that I wanted to join a Commonweal Local Community in Cleveland. It took until August 20,2017 when I (along with fourteen others)  got an e-mail message from Commonweal saying that our first CLC meeting would be on September 7, 2017.

Nine of us showed up for that first meeting. I was very impressed with the relatively young physician facilitator. He offered us his home as a meeting place.  Nobody liked the brewery where we had our first meeting. However some of the members wanted to meet in a parish, or educational setting. The physician offered to try to get Saint Ignatius High School which was nearby.  He also decided that he did not want to continue to be the contact person. When Saint Ignatius did not come through, he requested the members help in finding a parish.  I was able to get Saint Noel to agree within 24 hours and thereby became the contact person. The contact person job of receiving new members from the Commonweal website and scheduling meetings sounds simple on paper. It has been anything but simple. "Herding cats" comes to mind.

Comparison of the Two Commonweal Communities

The total number of people involved in each community is about the same. 

The virtual community consists of about a dozen people who make posts. Some do this more frequently than others. My notion of community has been that each member posts once a week and comments on everyone's posts. There are at least another dozen but not more than two dozen members who just comment. So all together we have about three dozen people. 

The total number of people that have ever been on the Cleveland mailing list is also about three dozen. Over the years about a dozen people have attended our meetings regularly for at least several months; however not all at the same time. One frequent attender died, another moved to Oregon, another changed jobs, etc. About a dozen people have come only once. Another dozen people have never come at all,  yet don't want me to take them off the mailing list.  The number of members at a meeting has varied between 3 and 10, with the median about 6 or 7.  However who shows up can be very different. We had one almost all male meeting, and most of those males had at one time or other studied for the priesthood!  We have had several meetings which consisted mostly of couples!  So for people who come once to try it out, it is like a lottery.  In order to experience richness and diversity of our membership one has not only to come to every meeting (to get the one-timers) one has to be the contact person who deals with the people who have never come to a meeting! We have a great deal of unrealized potential.

The composition of both the virtual community and our local community consists of talented people and very diverse backgrounds and professions. The greater diversity of the virtual community consists solely that we are spread around the whole country. We are in the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Almost everyone is from a different state. However if we calculated social-economic indicators like age, education, wealth, etc. the two groups would be very similar. Both groups contain almost equal numbers of men and women. 

What I Value About the Virtual Commonweal Community

The virtual community like the old Commonweal blog does not confine itself to Commonweal articles but rather looks at the whole world in terms that are well captured by the Four Medieval Transcendentals: the One (e.g. religion) the True (e.g. philosophy, science, and technology) the Good (e.g. politics, and humanities), and the Beautiful (e.g. the arts). The Jesuit John O'Malley has called these the Four Cultures of the West. I prefer to think of them as Four Forms of Spirituality in the West.

A major advantage of the new blog is that every member can post. We are not confined to commenting upon contributors who functioned much as clergy. In a post each one of us can bring together what we find of the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in whatever topic we choose. In other words, the blog has the potential of expressing our own spirituality, the integration of our personal lived spiritual existence.

Another major advantage of virtual community blog is that we can do it whenever we want. We can use spare moments to compose a future post and to make comments upon posts. We don't have any deadlines. There may be hectic times when we don't comment for several days, or post for several weeks. 

The virtual community blog has also been a constant companion. A new post arrives every day or two. There are new comments almost every day. Most of the comments stick to the post. Sometimes everyone just comments on the post with only a few comments on the comments so we get about a dozen comments. However often the comments develop into longer threads of twenty or thirty comments. Some posts have generated conversations lasting fifty comments or more. While most of the comments remain on target, often members will use a day with few comments to introduce an "off topic" conversation usually about something that we have often discussed with a link to an article in place of a new post.  

A Hybrid Commonweal Local Community?

If there is anything that we should have learned from this pandemic it is the value of the virtual world as a dimension of every organization.  Our parishes are making a big mistake if they think of livestreamed Masses as something necessary for the pandemic but easily shut down in favor of getting people back to church. Research shows that people have found many sources of worship online outside their own congregations. Many are not going to disappear as alternatives to onsite worship. Parish members should be able to participate in livestream and recorded Masses and other events such as baptisms, weddings and funerals. 

The thirty-some members of our local community are spread across the Cleveland area with about equal numbers of people in the East, West, Center, and Akron areas. This distribution closely matches the distribution of Commonweal readership in the Cleveland area. No matter where one locates a meeting it will still be a long drive for many. 

If we divided into four groups they would have about nine people each.  Even if two thirds showed up for a meeting, there would still be only six persons at a meeting. Many who have come to our meetings say they are much better when we have eight to ten members participating.  

After the first  year I began our Cleveland Blog as a step on the way to becoming a hybrid local community.  More recently I have opened up this blog's capacity to record comments. It could be opened to multiple posters. (All these added capacities involve a learning curve, longer for some members than others).  

Some concrete ways that we could use the virtual world of our blog 
to grow community for our members:

1. Instead of just announcing a topic, have the facilitator introduce the topic through a blog post. Often one or more of our members has special expertise on a given topic including access to additional information. It would be far better to present all that in the form of the blog post rather than taking up time at the meeting and turning it into more a class than a discussion. 

2. Allow members to add comments with links to additional information about a topic. Even if no one has special expertise, members have often done their homework for the article. Again it is better to share all the home work in terms of comments on the topic with appropriate links before the meeting rather than during the meeting. Sometimes members bring up information during the meeting that others would like to access through links, references, etc. That could all be done through comments after the meeting. 

3. Have someone take minutes from the gathering for posting on the blog. All this documentation would provide a virtual experience of the meeting for members who are unable to come. This all takes some work, but it is work that can be done in bits and pieces when time is available. 

4. Give every member the right to make one post a month on any article in a recent issue of Commonweal.  Why limit the discussion to only the articles that can fit into ninety minutes, and only to the members who are able to come to the meeting?  A lot of material in Commonweal gets little attention such as book reviews and poetry.  Book reviews are very difficult to discuss except for those who have read the book.