Crafting Community
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Description
By Ismael Peña-López:
"Main characteristics of the online crafting community:
- Solid existing “real world” community.
- Long tradition of learning by doing.
- Long tradition of sharing among peers. It is a institutionless and hierarchyless community.
- Shops, workshops and coffee shops are a meeting point rather than a place where to make businesses.
- Broad range of socio-economic, education profiles and age (i.e. very far from the “bored housewife” topic).
- Non-geek and usually low-tech profile. In any case, technology is definitely not a goal, or something you discuss, but a tool and something to forget about. But,
- Intensive and broad use of a wide range of applications, most of them web 2.0 and/or cloud applications.
- Expert use of rich media production, edition and diffusion tools: rich text, photography, audio, video…
- Use of social networking sites and social networking tools in other sites to strengthen community links.
- Use of social networking site not as an alternate world or community — in opposition to the offline world — but as an extension of the existing communities and networks.
- Use of social networking sites to enlarge the community, and benefit from the low transaction costs of communicating through the Internet to build a critical mass of minority interests (the “long tail”), be it to buy and sell or just to exchange knowledge and practices.
Summing up: a very heterogeneous community that gathers around a common interest (crafting), and intensively uses technology to deal about this interest, proving a high and practical digital literacy level, which normally comes not from a technical background.
A second derivative is that digital literacy and virtual community building act as a driver against exclusion — because of the stress in networking — and for e-inclusion — because of the intensive use of ICTs." (http://ictlogy.net/20081027-from-social-networks-to-virtual-communities-of-practice-beyond-e-inclusion-through-digital-literacy-i-the-case-of-the-crafting-community/)