Open Warrior

There’s something about community development which makes it special. This has been one of my more recent thoughts as a result of the work I’ve been doing building an Afrika Burns themed cape site.

Being a full time student, many people ask me if what I’m doing ‘is for marks.’ I assume the reason that they ask is because I, and many others, are putting so much effort into making this as good as we possibly can.

In the end we stand to gain absolutely nothing financially, in fact, we end up making a loss since we’re spending money on buying building materials, transporting the materials, and many other things.

What we’re doing is a classic example of what I call, ‘the community development model.’ In the community development model, a group of people come together, usually at their own personal expense, and work towards contributing to something greater than themselves for the sake of ‘the greater good.’

Perhaps one of the greatest examples is that of the irish builders building houses for the disadvantaged communities along the cape flats. This large group of irish builders, the youngest of who is only 17, come to South Africa, completely covering all their own costs (flights, accomodation, etc) and build houses for the disadvantaged.

Yochai Benkler extensively examines community development and gives several examples, such as the free software communities and SETI@HOME, in his book ‘The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transfers Markets and Freedom.’ Probably the most interesting thing about the community development model is that it can accomplish significantly more than the traditional, commercial development models, where participants are driven by (financial) self-gain alone. Consider community based p2p networks vs. commercial platforms offering the same content. The commercial platforms are unable to keep up with the community networks in terms of the number of participants, and variation in available media.

Reward beyond the financial reward exists in community development. In a traditional economic cost-benefit-analysis it could be said that in the community development model, the benefit of contributing towards improving the wellbeing of others, exceeds the financial cost of doing so.

The reason that the community development model is so successful, is that it taps into something that makes us human. The need to do something for the greater good…the need to do something for others.