For a long time, community online was really an aspiration for a communal place to hang out.  Virtual worlds were just that. You went there, avatar firmly on your head, milled around and bumped into others.

Social nets like Facebook were built on that premise as well.

You go there and run into friends. You get call backs to engage through email and text. You are encouraged to post then nudged to reengage when Liked or commented on. Facebook is all about its place as the center of the web, even the world.

This idea of a centralized online world, url-specific, will end up in a museum alongside dioramas of Pleistocene era cave dwellers and the Dodo bird. Evolutionary end points are happening right in front of us.

The change may take some time, but it will happen.

The premise that place online matters at all is just not grounded in reality. Offline, no question, but the metaphor of the online world mirroring offline is a legacy myth that is fraying at the edges.

The social web is not about platforms, not about places you go, not even at a core level about groups. It’s about you and me experiencing it in real time.

Community happens on the web because each of us is given the biggest chair in the room, the microphone for the planet to listen to our views. Because of the predominance of each of us as individuals.

Social animals that we are, we have the natural drive to couple into groups, but it all starts with each of us singularly first. We as individuals, not the group, are the atomic element of community.

I’ve been mulling about this for a while and I keep coming back t0 two core premises:

-That community lives exactly wherever we are at the moment, cross platform and network.

-That time not place is the matrix for connection. That all communities are in a way, flash occurrences in time.

Community exists because each of us is a superset of all of our connections across all of our networks. We rise to the top of them as they self organize themselves under us.

Attempts to aggregate them will simply not work. (See You can’t airlift community). Attempts to force people to join a common intergroup to participate fall flat. (My blog discussion around 9/11 was happening at the same time on four different networks with me as the only point of common reference.)

The social nets don’t provide any real context. We populate them with friends and colleagues, different mixes in different places. Some are heavier in tech, some in wine, some in something else. But any of them could be the best source of information for just about any topic. Serendipity happens regardless of how well we choose our connections, not because of it.

The belief that the antidote to the signal/noise conundrum on the web is curation is temporary at best. The true answer to found value and the most natural direction for discovery is community. Flash community that is formed cross network, around each of us, at any time wherever we are.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of Flash Communities for a long time.  Three years ago I wrote a post about the idea of communities cropping up around media driven events. Events today are simply wherever we are, with our interactions an event in its own right, pulling our networks along with us.

Today, when I put out a post that catches the market’s attention, it surfaces on Twitter, crosses to Facebook, back to my blog, populates my inbox with messages. I’ll be asked at my next in person meeting perhaps. The pundits will call this successful content marketing. They are wrong.

This is community, pure and simple, grounded in an event, based in time.

Why does Kickstarter work when there is no community? It works because a project touches someone who shares it, creating flash communities and connections from one side of the web to another, to your dinner table and to discussions with friends at the wine bar.

Why does the web, for all its oceanic storms of movement and over abundance of content, feel calm and easy to navigate today?  The dynamics we’ve created on various networks have created a social gravity of sorts, around each of us that cuts through proprietary protocols, cuts through all of these groups, and coalesces in instances around needs and ideas.

How does this relate to how we build products and companies? How we act on the web?

Not so simple.

We will continue to create apps and websites for specific associations or context-rich connections around common bounds. That is how people think and how human magnetism drives groupings and attractions, conscious or not.

But the connecting loops need to be cross platform, cross the web, cross our online and offline lives. With community in mind as the purest filter for context and each person as the moving center of their own self sorting world of interconnections.

It’s not all that clear how to do this.

For myself, I start with a focus on inclusion as the organic dna of communities. I avoid exclusion as a poise, as closed structures invariably fall flat and inevitably stifle growth. The web seems to embrace openness and rankles at discriminating behaviors in both action and design.

I focus on how ideas interlock with value and drive their own communities of interest based on singular events. I don’t think  about places but about time and attention as currency, and the dynamic that drives connections. And how connections bring others, to one topic, at one time, in a communal exchange.

This is community food for thought.

I admit, its easy to see that change is happening. It is way harder and more interesting figuring out where this plays out for how we use, build and capitalize on this changing community nature of the web. This is my first shot at it.