Much of my community building is done offline, in the workplace. We find in the consulting & education that we have to break habits of giving priority to the "stuff" instead of on the people.

In the case of workplace, "stuff" is square footage. Desks. Fancy chairs. Glass whiteboards. High tech whatever whatever. All of the *really nice stuff* that doesn't actually assist in building culture & community.

I was speaking with @anoemi & she suggested that one of the advantages of offline community building is that it is easier to draw a distinction between the "stuff" & the people. Online, it's less clear. In the communities you help build, what's your version of "stuff" that distracts from putting the focus on people?

Really interesting topic.

The first thing that came to my mind was gamification. It's almost like it's focused on tricking people into being more active. They're not talking to people to build real relationships, they're doing it for stats.

It also makes me think of vanity metrics for communities. We like to see how many likes we can get on a page, how many followers we can get. Even the amount of comments/interactions can be a vanity metric that LOOKS like a healthy community, but really don't represent the actual health of a community.

For me, the distracting "stuff" is focusing more on the outcome, than the process. If we get too focused on getting to "the answer" or "the resolution" or are more concerned with persuading people to accept our perspective, we lose focus of the journey itself. We become community by taking, and thinking, and discussing, growing, changing, learning.