Note
The rise of community
For twenty years the story about how people gather has been a story about screens. Underneath it, the number of organisations whose actual job is to get people into the same room has multiplied, and it is still climbing.
The count.
Meetup listed 130,000 groups in 2014[2] and 330,000 by January 2023[1]. Coworking spaces went from 160 at the end of 2008[3] to a projected 42,000 by the end of 2024 — a forecast made in 2022 rather than a count, so treat it as a direction[4]. Running is the newest of them: Strava recorded a 59% rise in run-club participation worldwide in 2024 alone[5].
Then there are the organisations that run a community as part of something else, and here nobody publishes a world total. What can be checked: at least 7,000 incubators and accelerators, by a count that is now a decade old[6]; 60,580 trade and professional bodies recognised in the United States alone in 2022[7]; 3,896 degree-granting institutions there and 291 higher-education providers in the UK[8][9], each with an alumni body behind it, beside more than 900 university members and affiliates across Europe[10]. Those are components, not a sum, and they already run well into the hundreds of thousands once the rest of Europe and the UK's own professional bodies are counted. No round number is worth printing.
| What | Earlier | Latest |
|---|---|---|
| Meetup groups | 130,000 (2014) | 330,000 (2023) |
| Coworking spaces | 160 (2008) | about 42,000 (2024, projected) |
| Run-club participation | — | up 59% in a year (2024) |
| Incubators and accelerators | — | at least 7,000 (2016) |
| US trade and professional bodies | — | 60,580 (2022) |
| Universities, US and UK | — | 3,896 and 291 (2022-23) |
Why it matters now.
Two lines cross at about this point. One is the number of communities, which has gone up every year for two decades and shows no sign of turning. The other is what software can actually do for the person running one.
Until recently it could do very little. A community manager's real work is reading what people say, remembering it, noticing which two of them should meet, and asking at a moment that suits both. None of that is a form or a report, which is why the tools built for the job were directories and newsletters: they handled the parts that fitted a database and handed the rest back. Models that can read a year of messages and hold what they mean have only just become good enough to do the other parts, and to do them for every person rather than the few you had time for.
That is the whole of the timing argument. More communities than ever, and, for the first time, a way to do the work they need at the size they have actually reached.