Blogosphere Pleasure of the Week - Community Roles
One of this week’s high points for me was visiting Tara Hunt’s weblog ::HorsePigCow::. Tara is a fellow Canadian, who is now in San Francisco. My loss, not to have met her before she left Toronto.
Tara is writing on the community roles we play. In her post titled Archetypes in Communities - The Caretaker, she profiles her own Jungian personality type, and refers to the ways in which interaction between people in different roles is an architectural component of healthy communities (my words).
I’ve valued Jung’s theories highly since discovering his work as an adolescent. This discovery was occasioned by reading that Carl Jung collected case studies of children who saw mandalas. I also sought out the definitions of mandala and learned that I had been one of the children who saw them.
In her second post the next day, Tara reviewed a primary list of archetypes, asking What’s Your Archetype?. Although I do agree that these personality types are more behavioral models than true archetypes, the work that Tara is doing in studying our roles in communities is most welcome.
Visit her post to find the url of a site where you can take a Myers-Briggs typology test to determine your personality type. If this sort of test interests you, check out the Personal DNA link in the sidebar here as well. Most tests such as these are far too short and standardized to give an accurate in-depth representation, so using a variety, and reading further about the various theories is the best practice. Understanding ourselves better is usually beneficial to all our relationships and interactions in life, too.
The understanding of communities, and the complex dynamics of people in them, is (imo) one of the essential steps toward creating online resources that address needs and desires we all have that go beyond personal gratification, that connect us to one another on more than a superficial level. I can also easily imagine a myriad of other online applications for more of this kind of mapping.
Go Tara. 
