Connected Communities Network

A Worldwide Web of Intentions, Stakeholders, and Results

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The ConnectedCommunity.net domain has been registered for potential hosting of tools, applications, and services supporting the Strategy Markup Language (StratML) standard (ISO 17469-1) to enable individuals and organizations to form "truly connected" communities. Related initiatives include "smart cities" and "sister cities". However, the focus of the former is on connecting technology in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the focus of the latter is on paired cities.

By contrast, Truly Connected Communities are about more than high-speed voice and data communication or other narrowly specialized interests. Instead, they are characterized by highly productive interactions among people (individual human beings) based upon shared values grounded in the collaborative pursuit of common and complementary objectives of all kinds, with or without reference to locality or traditional organizational constructs.

For example, communities may be formed around interests (CoIs) or practices (CoPs). For social purposes, interpersonal communication itself may be the desired self-serving outcome, e.g., in social networking services. That is certainly a worthy purpose and it has made billionaires of those who do it best. However, for more mature business-quality purposes, truly and consciously connected human beings will form communities of results (CoRs) in service to others, thereby engaging performance partners to produce highly meaningful outcomes far more efficiently and effectively than ever before possible.

For additional context, see:

• The Atlantic's July 3, 2017, article entitled "What Does 'Community' Mean? The term's evolution makes a nice metaphor for the rise of American individualism - and the decline of trust in American institutions"
• This article, entitled "The State, Markets & Communities," based upon Raghuram Rajan’s book, The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

If you'd like to help make Hilton Head the world's first and foremost Truly Connected community, check out the town's comprehensive plan and consider engaging in support of the relevant objectives. Here's an informal plan for what the Town Manager, Mayor, and Town Council might do to advance the cause.

Ideally, Augustana University, which had the paper-based analog of Facebook at least four decades before Mark Zuckerberg became a multi-billionaire, would also be in the vanguard of the movement to create more mature business-quality networking services.

** About our logos: The StratML logo depicts a virtuous cycle in a worldwide web of intentions, stakeholders, and results. The Truly Connected Community logo conveys the concept of people collaboratively lending a hand toward continuous improvement of our virtually shrinking world. Together, we can make it happen.