I had occasion to think of this again (& thanks @ourfounder) in the context of a couple of very small, seasonal, local mailing lists that I’m on.

There are some sets of community that because of the seasons happen only once a year. The set of people who know when in this town you should can tomatoes (because they are abundant and cheap and farmers have a surplus), the set of people who park cars on their lawns for football games 6x/year, the peculiar rituals around back to school, the 4th of July parade etc all have their community aspects.

The passing of time forces these communities to be slow, in the sense that you can only really operate at the pace of the seasons. There may be a frantic build up to an event but the real win comes when you can build an organization over what may be many years that can do something that looks to the outside to be enormous (e.g. serve 12,000 chicken dinners in one day) but which is really the end result of 55 years of process development.

In contracting there’s always a linear outlined action plan with outcomes and deliverables. While I used to be able to write one of these easily, I find these days, the more I am working with technology in communities, the more difficult it is for me to put some things ahead of others in a linear way. More often than not there is significant looping back to inform actions more clearly and yet it would appear to an observer that looping back is wasted time. Your post and several of the comments make me think that maybe sometimes slowing down and looping back or standing still is exactly what we need to do. Maybe we ask a different question, maybe the slow motion helps us to get new people connected and engaged and maybe we need to experience and recognize the pattern. In the end, you nailed it … it is “discerning if and where to intervene” that makes all the difference and that is the really tall order. Thank you.