“During a break on the Thursday I took the chance to ask Nancy White a question – “What is a ‘healthy’ community?” In looking at these various orientations it struck me that there must be recognizable ‘patterns,’ say, of a “successful open source community,” that could help us recognize others when we see them. This is exactly right and exactly wrong; as Nancy helped me understand, exactly wrong because it locates the notion of health in some abstract standard outside the community, when the notion of health being put out here is about internal coherence and accord – is the community becoming (or at least striving to be) what it wants to be“.
By Scott Leslie, Northern Voice ‘10: …, May 11th, 2010

Emphasis mine.