Taxonomies of communities
08 June 2026
Taxonomy is the study of grouping together things that are alike in a hierarchical system. This allows you to compare across groups. It allows you to see relationships between types of groups and in general produce some sort of order where there may be very little before. A very common place to do this is in the classification of animals: the groups we have defined are species, genus, family, and so on. You get, then, something like: blue whales are baleen whales, which are whales, which are sea mammals, which are mammals. And that’s hierarchical. It tells you blue whales are more alike to humpback whales (because they are both baleen whales) than they are to dolphins, for example, even though they’re all sea mammals.
I’ve been thinking a lot about taxonomy recently because it really does allow us to transfer knowledge and/or intuition across groups. For example, if you are very familiar with a certain type of whale, then you know that you can map a lot of the knowledge you have about that whale to another. And what you get in taxonomy is this relationship map between things. But I’ve been thinking a lot about this not with respect to objects or animals, but ideas and communities. It is clear that not every community is the same. You have communities that aim to be all-encompassing, for example. Most religions fall under that description. All of the people in that religion share, if we take the Abrahamic religions, say, the belief that the holy book of their religion is the word of God. And that means that they automatically share a lot. But there are other communities as well. There are communities like work colleague communities. In every place of work, there is a community of people, and this can sometimes be very tight-knit and it can sometimes be very loose. But the thing that they have in common is that they all work in the same place. Perhaps producing a taxonomy is too ambitious a goal here because of the complexity at play - it’s certainly not a problem with one answer - but it is an interesting problem to reflect on: what could such a taxonomy look like? And what use might this be?
Well, I can think of quite a few, but I’ll outline one here. If you had a taxonomy of communities, then one of the variables one might categorise on is the way they were run as well as the possible ways of running them. For example, you might think of someone who leads a certain community, say, a running club. And they’ve got an idea of the sort of atmosphere that they want to induce for members of the community. A taxonomy of communities would tell that person what sort of processes or implementations they could provide in creating that community, by virtue of presenting case studies. There would be examples of things like rules and guidelines, decision making, and responsibilities. Sometimes it’s very decentralised, and other times it’s a bit of a cult of personality. These things have profound effects on the way that the community feels, they have profound effects on the way that the community operates, and they have profound effects on what the succession of that community would look like when the person who is ‘leading’ it leaves. Importantly, these variables mentioned have interdependency, and they need to make sense as a whole.
Think about the role of a leader as a defining trait in the taxonomy, because I think that that really is the crux of it. What is the leader able to do, and what is the leader not able to do? Where does that community get their truth from? What is it that the community shares with each other, and what does it not share with each other? Members of a community can become quite disgruntled if the idea of the person who runs the community or the people who run the community differs in this regard to their own idea of what the community should look like. I have seen a couple of examples of this in both directions, might I add. If someone in the community thinks that it should only be a running club and nothing more, i.e. the only thing that should be shared is an interest in running, they would be very frustrated by, for example, political discussion coming up, or the centre of gravity of the community being in a certain political direction or another. And yet, vice versa is also true. If someone was looking for a community of people to share their life with, then they might be very annoyed or unsatisfied if the community was only a running club. So how do you make it clear to people when, where the community lies and what sort of community it is? As usual with these things, a well-run community will make all of this clear in a far more astute and implicit way than defining its taxonomic bracket, but too often it is not clear.
So for your communities, take a moment to think about how it actually works, because it doesn’t come for free.