When I think of a community, I think of shared context. People who engage in activities over a period of time that relate to some specific site (on the web or in the world or located in a 
common cause or subject) are engaged in the act of being in a community. The nature of that context is not by definition good or bad, supportive or degrading. It is whatever the group makes it.
Community is elastic and limiting. It is somewhere between a group and a government. It is something that involves its active members – prevents them from being isolated, even if the community itself is not in contact with much of the world. I believe that a community lives through an aging process or a time-line: a history that does not have to lead to something like tradition, but could.
It is an active thing, community. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it must be lived in order to exist. When people do not actively engage in community events or in the life of other community members, then what you have is something more like an artifact or a dust-catcher.
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