Eureka

I came to an epiphany the other day. I have been planning on applying for the Watson Fellowship (a really amazing travel grant) and have been struggling to coherently describe what it is I am interested, and now I have it (or at least a beginning):

I am interested in how people create, maintain, and strength understandings of common interest within a group of people (i.e. a community) and how this awareness of communal relevance is/can be used solve problems.

Jon Lebkowsky has written a really interesting article for Worldchaning.com called Complexity, Megacommunity, and Adaptation about different models for community organizing. The ideas he talks about have been around for awhile (multi-institution problem solving and non-hierarchical complex organizing) but what is interesting is explanation about why these are better models for solving the problems we are facing today.