<aside> 💡
In the visualization, planet brightness represents love and the number of rings represents reach, relative to members at the same level.
</aside>
The network's gravity is a function of the love and reach of each member. Love is the member's degree of leadership, responsibility, and commitment. Reach is the member's degree of connectedness, visibility, and influence.
Gravity is everything that pulls your members toward the center of the community and keeps them in orbit. In the Orbit Model, gravity is a function of the love and reach of members.
Love represents the member's level of involvement and responsibility. Are they leading the charge or just curiously exploring?
Reach represents a member's degree of connectedness and influence within the community. How essential is the member to the community's flow of information?
A member with high love and high reach creates a lot of gravity: their excitement and contribution to the community pulls others in and catalyzes action. On the other hand, a member with low love (or even dislike) will push members away in accordance with their reach — in other words, the greater their reach, the more people they potentially push away.
At the community level, love and reach are like the yin and yang - neither is complete without the other. Without love, reach stagnates at the networking level and quickly gets old. Without leveraging the collaborative powers of high reach, love remains an isolated phenomenon, and can quickly grow weak.
To increase gravity, a community must design loops where purposeful action leads to deeper relationships, which lead to more energy and excitement, and more activity. "Purposeful" here means activity that's consistent with the community's mission and enhances the wellbeing and connectedness of members.
These actions should always create value for the member in the process, otherwise they will eventually stop being receptive and their love and reach will decrease.
Gravity, love, and reach provide a community builder with a set of heuristics for describing their community and a model for determining the right times and ways to invest in each member.