Community of purpose

A community of purpose is a community of people who are going through the same process or are trying to achieve a similar objective.

From user-generated reviews or collaborative filtering on a site such as Amazon.com which help people decide what to buy to the reputation system at eBay which gives users a sense of who they're dealing with before they transact, the community fuels accomplishment. The gravity of the given community of purpose is directly proportional to how much it makes possible for the people who are there to get something done. While the size of the community matters it has a lot more to do with how effective the participants in the community are, in fact. However, the size and scale of the active community participation are important as it relates to fulfilling the needs of those who around and are willing to engage to get what they want. Effective communities of practice are balancing act between offering the right capabilities and ensuring sufficient capacity to deliver efficiently. With the possible exception of electronic commerce, media consumption, search, and research (as in Wikipedia) communities of purpose are the most underdeveloped properties on the Internet.