“A community is a connected group of people with something in common.”
That’s been my go-to definition of community for the last five years.
I feel like I stumbled across the less academic version of the social sciences example. 
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not as tidy as a dictionary definition, but I will still try:
Community is where many-to-many value sharing happens. It’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear “greater than the sum of its parts”.
“Community is greater than the sum of its members”?
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I try really hard not to overcomplicate this, because anyone you talk to generally has an intrinsic understanding of what a community is. Community is one of the things that made humans incredibly successful, and we’ve all experienced it.
You can complicate it by trying to define what an online community, or an offline community, or a local community, or a community of passion all are. But the broadest definition, and the one that always made the most sense to me, is:
Community is the condition of having an interest in common with other humans.
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I’m currently writing a newsletter for the community I advocate for (Ministry of Testing) and I just wrote this:
The Ministry of Testing community is an entity that creates crucial career sparks.
So here’s a definition. It might not be my go-to yet it’s an attempt at one.
A community is an entity that creates crucial sparks
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The definitions on this topic are incredibly helpful. Thanks for sharing! 
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Truth be told I have also struggled and tried to make this definition work, but to little avail.
This might get long, because I guess I have nothing else to do on a Friday night, and, Ironically given the subject matter, I feel I’m among nerd-kin…
Emotionally I know that this definition…
…is a no-brainer - communities have “emergent properties” when humans act in specific ways to create them. Still, I never liked putting that feeling into a definition. This approach unsettles me from an anthropological perspective even if it warms my heart spiritually and emotionally.
Recognizing the ivory-tower in this statement, the idea that a community is “more than the sum of its parts” feels very floaty to me. Yes, it is certainly an inarguable fact that community cannot be defined in totality, but floaty is usually viewed as a hint to test more than it is a grounded statement in Anthropology. Could this fact simply be the resulting feeling of a good community? There can be bad communities—simply because they lack this pervasive reality, even if they hit on everything else to some extent.
Similar to @rosiesherry 's concern with belonging and relationships, it feels like we are defining the community as the result of mechanisms present, but not wholly accounted for.
To dive further into the rabbit hole…
Let’s say we try to make this work, the same way Biology tries to make this work.
The phrase “emergent properties” is frequently used in Biology classes to represent the collaborative functions of biological cells or tissues we do not understand yet.
A look at the accepted definitions of “emergent properties,” are:
“a characteristic that any entity gains when it becomes part of a bigger system.”
and…
“A set of described properties that arise through interactions among smaller parts, that alone does not exhibit such properties.”
Primary examples in biology are tissue matrixes and nerve clusters. The nerve cell doesn’t have the capacity to move a muscle, but in combination with the surrounding cellular complexes, it can create a stupid amount of force and move a human arm.
So while different cells in a biological “system” are not on their own or in sum capable of the force, leverage, and energy required to make a human, they can nonetheless.
You can repeat this again with the gut microbiome and again with the biggest problem - the emergent properties of a brain that produces conciousness.
Now, applying this definition back to community…
When I bring Biology’s definitions into the context of a community, I feel like I get nowhere. Just like Neuro-biologists are getting nowhere all that fast with human consciousness.
What these definitions DO achieve, however, is create a ridiculously powerful thought engine for asking questions and exploring the problem space. I mean, just follow any line of questions starting with an emergent property and there’s loads of new research to be done.
The same happens with Community, so perhaps it’s more useful to think of emergent community traits as a question than a definition.
Combining this question with the definition I provided above…
[…] attitudes, values, goals, experiences, practices, and artifacts […]
I feel like I’ve introduced a factor I’ll never be able to identify no matter how hard I try, and yet, I will forever have a community to research. That’s very useful to a community professional, but not as a definition.
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I still go by this one by Myriam Laberge from around 2007 or so (no link to the original source as her old blog no longer exists):
“A ‘community’ is created over time around shared purpose, language and meaning, and the development of shared values, reciprocity and mutual trust in the longer term from being and doing together.”
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I LOVE this one!
From an anthropological point of view, there is a difference between the culture of a space and its context. A context is the description of a site you’re studying. It’s like a snap-shot in time. “Where are we now?” Culture is that context’s change over time. How it came to be the way it is, and where it will go.
I think this definition captures that difference, and also the nature of context’s impact on the community. It’s got the necessary makings of a strong day-to-day community builder. To have the language and the purpose of building meaning. To empart that purpose through values, to understand how others react to it, trust them to help, and improve.
I LOVE IT! I may use this as the new colloquial definition for sure!
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Love all the perspectives here! In trying to boil it down in a way that made sense to a variety of coworkers and underlined what made it different than other efforts, I landed on this:
Community is a group of people coming together around a shared interest, situation, or goal and gaining value out of interacting with each other.
I then usually spend a little time emphasizing the “interacting with each other” portion, to dispel the idea that a newsletter is a community.
It’s very simply and not very romantic, but I feel it gets to the core ingredients.
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Just came across another one, quite similar:
A community is a group of people united by a common identity and collective purpose who engage in activities together over time. Communities develop unique sets of shared values, principles, and norms that distinguish them from others and provide members with a sense of belonging.
Source: The Open Source Way 2.0
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Love how you’ve come back here to update with more, I will do the same every time I come across a definition I like. 
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One definition I saw today as I’m trying to close my tabs:
I think true community requires a few things: shared values, shared effort, and shared passion.
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Agreed! This is great!
I think I’ll make a video covering my definition and probably CTA it to this conversation to get more of them running?
I think that would be really cool! We could make it a whole thing, and I can work to put them together as a research project.
We could also publish a 1-question survey after a bit to scale it if the results are interesting?
Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
Thoughts?
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I can ask on Twitter and LinkedIn too, and bring the links/responses here.
We can do a survey on top of that too.
A video is cool, could also summarise as an article and publish on Rosieland?
I tried asking ChatGPT, but I was not really impressed with the answer:
A community is a group of people who live in the same area and share common interests and experiences. It is a social unit that is characterized by a sense of togetherness and belonging, and can be based on various factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, nationality, or shared interests.
Here’s a Tweet and LinkedIn post with some further responses.
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Pfft that GPT response is so crazy vague! I mean, I guess it’s a start LOL
I think a video would be a good way to get the word out, and also report on it so maybe it can be a series where we ask during a video of my definition, and then we can put out a survey, and follow up with a blog, newsletter post, and video talking about the results?
Definitely Scope creep but it would be super fun and very useful as a collab between a lot of people!
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Hey just wanted to contribute @Bri Leever’s most recent definition from her talk with Gradual Community 
Blockquote
A diverse group of people coming together for a common purpose, goal, or affinity.
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Community: A group of people who come together around a shared purpose and work together for shared outcomes.
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Found this one through Marta Gonzalez’s pdf on designing communities!
Here’s the full PDF:
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I love the collection that is being built up here. 
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