In elegance comes restraint,

In elegance comes restraint,
 
Define:Community
 
a group of people living in a particular local area; "the team is drawn from all parts of the community".
 
Well for most parts I would agree with the above statement, but I suppose the bigger question is; What does community mean to you?
 
To me it consist of a collection of people who have a similar and common goal, or goals and interact with a combined purpose. I suppose my biggest, and most vocational experience with that is the Linux community, both locally and globally. I suppose the definition of community i'm looking for is; (ecology) a group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other. Which I believe describes certainly our local community in Dundee, Scotland aptly.
 
We're made of such a wide and varied bunch of people. There seems to be no rule of thumb, no rhyme nor reason to explain why these individuals mix so effectively interact with each other, apart from common purpose. One common goal the wider adoption of Linux. It is the only thing all of these people have in common. It gets stranger when you think Linux doesn't describe much, it describes a type of operating system. There are many variants of Linux, and sometimes best described as different flavours, can be easily customised to locus with very little expertise. In university they tried to teach me about working in multi-disciplinary teams, and I was left thinking (as most mature students), bit late for that. However maybe I was fast to jump to a conclusion, I learn form the open source community everyday. By practical experience I learn to talk to programmers, designers, teachers, students, promoters, advocates, power users, business users, desktop users all using Linux for different reasons. No same interdependent organism using it for the same interdependent purposes.
 
Through this mix I can tell you from personal experience, more so as the more I have been involved within the community that differing goals, views, passions, can cause disharmony. As I have found myself making friends from all over the world, I sometimes find that I lose some close to me in the community. As beliefs change, and change brings new perspective, with that brings new ideals, and new methods of implementing this goals. I'm thrown back to another life time ago, when I had a deep rooted interest in psychology and I found myself drawn to the works of Carl G Jung, and sometimes I see his struggle to explain society, and community in psychological context with lose parallels to my pursuit to understand our community. He once said "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
 
So is this to mean that it's our differences as well as our parallels that unite us as a community? I see the underlying confusions in such a statement. If I don't like your view, and you don't like my view where do we find common ground. Maybe we are hard wired to the adage of my enemies, enemy is my friend, however I find something in the inertly uncomfortable with that. I hope that it sits more in line with the fact that it's the liberty of the community to disagree with each other. That it is in the freedom, we actually find self actualisation (Freud and Jung in the same article, wonders will never cease).
 
With this in mind I find the prospect of the future in interesting one, to view peoples difference as what unites us. The fact that they are not happy with the current climate, all though we may not agree on how that is achieved, the fact the we all in this community have a similar view, that changes is what's required is what makes us a group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other.
 
The catalyst for this in my belief is, freedom, choice, liberty, hope, and now difference. To all of those that I have disagreed with along the way in this journey, I thank you for teaching me more about myself, then I ever gave credit for. I hope one day those that have taught me, that I too have been a teacher, as well as a student.
 
Arron M Finnon
President
UAD Linux Society
 
www.thelinuxsociety.org.uk