Re: ‘Peripheral’ Community Members, like Carla, Lurkers (hello!), and My Fiancee

Here is something I have been thinking about with regard to ‘peripheral’ members of our community.

With Carla, or even internet lurkers (hello out there to all of our fans; we do this for you, and thank you for your support!), there is some quantifiable and observable way for us to know that they are part of our community. Carla directly interacts with many of us, and the lurkers (hello again) directly interact with our content, even if in a passive way.

But what about this:

Every Thursday, after I leave Chambers, I spend the next hour telling my fiancee all about our class. She knows all about the technologies we discuss (and I have even hooked her on using some of them, like Google Reader), and all about the discussions we have. In fact, sometimes she even engages me by trying to form and articulate the difference between knowledge and learning, or community and identity — an extension of our discussions.

Despite this, she has never been to any of the class sites — Pligg, the class blog, your blogs, or my blog — and I have yet to bring up any of her points in class.

So is she a member of our community? Unlike Carla, who we can interact with in class, and lurkers (one more shout out to my homies in cyberspace) who leave a statistic that Cole can identify through Google Analytics, my fiancee leaves no trace (until this comment, anyway). If you think she is a member of our community, why do you think that?