Community

• A group of individuals that share a combination of common interests, aims, purposes, values, and activities.
• They meet frequently and have a certain commitment.
• Relevant problems are solved cooperatively/collaboratively.
• In order to effectively communicate knowledge the group often develop a common background.
• It is also possible to form a virtual instead of a face-to-face community.

Community of Practice (CoP)

• A specification of communities that focuses on certain domains.
• It tends to integrate a wide spectrum of social areas reaching from:
  • Amateurs to Professionals.
  • Disadvantaged groups to gifted ones.
• The high degree of heterogeneity stresses again the importance of a common background.
• Therefore, everybody has to have access to the same information.
• A CoP contains potential of innovation if knowledge is communicated successfully.
• A group of people without some kind of coordinator will not be able to do so.
• The facilitator is a crucial factor for success.

The community within community music can be understood as an act of "hospitality."

Hospitality encompasses the central characteristics of Community Music practice. As a gesture toward another, hospitality begins with the welcome. The welcome becomes a preparation for the incoming of the potential music participant, generating a porous, permeable, open-ended affirmation of and for those who wish to experience active music making. Community Music as an act of hospitality becomes an ethical practice toward a relationship to another person, a humanism of the other according to which being-for-the-other takes precedence over being-for-itself.