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One of the biggest challenges in determining how a community creates, maintains and distributes value is the inconsistency of metrics. Some communities are created specifically for distributing a certain type of value (think "guilds" in Steemit) while others are coagulated around other gravitational centers (think fan communities around music or sports stars).

This variety makes the task of identifying how valuable a community is quite difficult.

I've been around communities, both online and offline, for more than 18 years. Each time I witnessed the creation, the growth and the demise of the certain community, there were 3 recurrent themes, 3 distinct measurements that were consistently emerging. I called them: age, belonging and contribution.

Or, in simpler terms: the "abc" of building a community.

Why Do You Event Want To Know That?

Well, because I think the current model, in which we are using a currency (being fiat or a cryptocurrency) to map value is outdated. A currency is only mapping the agreement between all the users of it, based on temporary requirements. It doesn't correctly reflect the genuine value created inside a community.

The best way to exemplify this is if we consider countries to be the most ubiquitous form of communities. Each country has its own currency. Each currency could (and should) reflect the overall power inside that economy.

But it seldom happens like this. Central banks are issuing certain policies that are affecting the currency value, based on political or economical factors. Interest groups are speculating the value of the currency, based on their own interest (being it economical profit or political power).

Sometimes, these policies are not explicit, like the laws of a country, but implicit, like in the case of miners in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Some transactions in the Bitcoin ecosystem will not be processed if they don't fit the requirements of miners (a certain transaction fee).

This process of mapping value with currency is based on a very old type of peer to peer agreement which build upon itself for thousands of years, adding more complexity with each iteration and encouraging a centralized way of management.

A more flexible approach towards mapping the value generated inside a community not only will decrease the complexity but it will have as a direct consequence an increase in the perceived value for all the observers. Hubcoin is my own attempt at solving this problem.

Age

How predictable is a community? How well established it is? How many other communities have already interacted with it? How much time the community had to improve its own processes?

The answer to all these questions comes from age. While not implicitly and accurately equaling age with value, the total time in existence of a community is a good indicator that there are some processes going on there. The mere fact that a community survives for a certain amount of time is a performance indicator.

But it's equally true that, as age becomes bigger and bigger, some processes may become obsolete. The internal inertia of a community can become a hindrance. Hence, considering only age as a value indicator of a community would be wrong. But combined with the following two, age receives more significance.

Belonging

How likely are the members of a community to stick with it? How predictable the size of a community is? To what extent its members will spend their own value just to be part of it? To what extent its members will go to protect the community from potential destructive forces?

The answer to all these questions comes from belonging. It may be measured in many ways. For a coworking space (which is what I call a pico-economy, from which the governance and financial model of Hubcoin was inferred) this would be the membership fee. For a country, this would be a combination of the taxes paid and the more diffuse concept of patriotism.

Belonging measures the potential power of a given community, based on the number of its members, the speed at which this number grows or shrinks and the value they will put at stake in order to just belong there, to be part of that community.

Age and belonging just by themselves will give relevant information about a community, but not enough to completely map it. For instance, one can create a community in which people are doing nothing, but are paying a membership fee just to be there. If nothing happens, that community will eventually implode.

Contribution

How much each member is impacting the community? How much of what he produces returns back to all the members of the community? What is the overall quality of skills and experience in a given community?

The answer to all these questions comes form the third metric: contribution. It may be also seen as legacy. Contribution can take many forms. To continue the coworking example, if one would regularly contribute to the coworking blog, or keep free webinars on his main skill to all the members, that will count as contribution.

Financially speaking, contribution is what's left in the community after each member takes out what he or she considers to be profit. In traditional terms, probably that would be the profit tax, in a country.

It's easy to see that if contribution is small, no matter how old the community is and no matter how prestigious being there is perceived, it won't generate too much value.

Infinite Combinations

As I started to play with a (very primitive) mathematical model of age, belonging and contribution, for the governance of the Hubcoin, I realized that these three metrics, correctly balanced, can map a lot of use cases.

Of course, if we go beyond the scope of Hubcoin, which is to map only pico-economies (extremely small communities, like coworking spaces, or guilds) then the complexity grows exponentially. The model should most likely be adjusted with more parameters to correctly map bigger and bigger economies.

But having at lest a functional layer of pico-economies mapped with Hubcoin should help in this process. It would give us something to build upon.

picture source - Pixabay

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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