# The Seven Principles Are a Community Diagnostic Jones and Vogl identify seven principles that bring people together: boundary, initiation, rituals, temple, stories, symbols, and inner rings. These aren't aspirational goals. They're structural elements. When a community is struggling -- low engagement, high churn, shallow relationships -- you can diagnose the failure by checking which principle is missing. No boundary means anyone can wander in and out, and nobody feels the distinction between insider and outsider. Without that distinction, there's nothing to belong to. No initiation means new members don't cross a threshold -- they just appear. Without a crossing point, membership has no weight. No rituals means there's nothing to do together that carries shared meaning. No temple means there's no place to gather (physical or digital) that's set apart for the community. No stories means the community can't transmit its values or help members see themselves in its history. No symbols means there's no shorthand for shared identity. No inner rings means there's no depth to grow into -- you're either in or you're out, with nothing between. The diagnostic power comes from specificity. When someone says "our community isn't working," the seven principles give you a checklist. Open source projects, for instance, often have strong temples (GitHub, forums) and strong stories (origin myths, technical achievements) but weak boundaries (who is a "member" of a GitHub project?), nonexistent initiation (you clone a repo and that's it), and almost no inner rings (there's a maintainer and there's everyone else). This isn't an accident of neglect. Open source culture actively resists boundaries and initiation because they feel exclusionary. But Jones and Vogl argue the opposite: "Leaders may be confused, thinking that avoiding discrimination means allowing everyone in all the time. This is a recipe for shallow experiences and unsafe gathering spaces." The framework applies across contexts. Churches that lose members often have weak initiation -- people attend for months without anyone noticing they arrived or left. Corporate developer programs with low engagement often lack inner rings -- there's no path from "signed up" to "invested." The principles don't prescribe what boundaries or rituals should look like; they just insist they need to exist. ## Why This Matters When community health declines, resist the impulse to add more content or events. Instead, run the diagnostic. Identify which of the seven structural principles is absent or degraded and address that gap first. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Being Anticipated Beats Being Tolerated - Visible Inclusion Shifts the Burden]] — applies-in: whether members can see that they were expected is observable evidence of community health. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Belonging Requires Choice Connection and Progress]] — extends: choice, connection, and progress name the member-level conditions that the broader diagnostic must test. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Ostrom-Theology Crossover - Commons Governance in Faith and Code]] — extends: the principles become testable when paired with observable rules, boundaries, participation, and accountability in a shared commons - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Open Source Projects Are Not Communities by Default]] — applies-in: the seven principles test whether an open-source project has formed a community rather than merely accumulated users and code. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/The Stadium Is the Dominant Open Source Pattern]] — contrasts: a spectator-heavy project reveals which community principles remain absent despite a large audience - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Commons & Community Governance MOC]] — applies-in: the MOC lists this note under Created. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Open Source Governance MOC]] — applies-in: the MOC lists this note under Community Architecture. ## Source - [[3. Resources/Literature Notes/Community Architecture - What Makes Communities Thrive vs Extract - Literature Note]] - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Books/Building Brand Communities]]