We define community here as "a spontaneous human network built for a specific non-profit purpose". Explicitly, it means people who come together voluntarily without compulsion.
The academic conferences that you are likely to attend in the future to present your results are a typical community. What you will find is not the exchange of information and knowledge for payment, but the curiosity and the desire to communicate
with people who share the same awareness of the issues and improve the value and quality of the knowledge obtained through surveys and researches through discussions.
Organizations that function as OSS (Open Source Software) development projects are also communities. There are various OSSs in the world, and while there are cases where they are developed to a high degree of perfection, there are also cases where they are terminated in the middle of development and disappear. The success or failure of such development depends on the successful operation of the community. Moodle is one of the most active OSSs in the world with a successful development and user community.
Read the article and see what we think is important for a community to form.
The official Moodle website,
http://moodle.org Moodle in English,is a constant source of lively community interaction and a treasure trove of ideas for research topics and new educational systems. Take a look at any one or
two of the discussion threads, called forums, and if you have any ideas that you've gotten, or even opinions on how you would join in the discussion, please mention them too.
Required reading
- Martin Dougiamas and Peter C. Taylor
"Moodle: Using Learning Communities to Create an Open Source Course Management System"
http://research.moodle.net/mod/data/view.php?d=1&rid=105 - Examples of actual community interactions
Moodle in English