Dale Sullivan
Discourse communities are specialized communities--like disciplines, clubs, professions, religious groups--that have their own communication practices. The broadest definition of such a community would involve considering questions about oral and written communication practices--when do people opt to write rather than to speak? when they speak, do they use phones or is it face to face? if phones, what are the conventions? when they write, what medium do they use? what varieties of document types (genres) do they use and for what purposes? how do they use previous documents? The list of questions could go on and on.
In order to explore the discourse community that you plan to become a part of, you will need to interview someone who knows the field well. This person may never have thought much about the discourse practices of the field, but she or he will have "tacit" knowledge of it. It's up to you to ask the right questions to get information.
When we think of a forum, we think about a place or medium where, (or through which) people communicate. The water fountain is an informal forum; the speaker's podium at a conference is a formal forum. A committee meeting is a forum, and a work team meeting is a forum. A discourse community is also a social community interacting in many ways. A professional journal is a forum for the exchange of ideas just as much as a listserv, though these forums differ in their conventions and purposes. Some forums are private; others are public. Their interaction is facilitated by communication, and communication takes places in forums. Therefore, a discourse community is likely to have many forums.
Genres are the typified responses that emerge in discourse communities, and they are grounded in recurrent situations. That is, similar situations continue to present themselves in these communities, and depending on how long the group has been together, it may have developed standard ways of speaking and writing in these situations. A funeral speech is a genre, and some cultures would expect different kinds of statements than others. A work cycle in a company goes through many stages, many of which are marked with documents like proposals and progress reports. Different companies will develop different conventions around these genres. Some communities have special requirements that generate specail genres. For instance, organic farmers must certify that their land is clean of chemicals and that their seeds are truly organic. A whole series of documents have grown up around the certification process, each having their own defacto names. Even though we can study these documents and learn their form and even describe the typical content, we don't have the same kind of situational knowledge that organic farmers have. Therefore, it takes experience and local knowledge to become a masterful user of genres within discourse communities.
A Case in Point. Let me describe an experience I had when I visited the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society Conference in February 2004. Although I did not go to this conference to research a discourse community, in retrospect I see that I encountered one. This society is made up of a group of people interested in organic farming. They share certain values, like their respect for the land and for other creatures, their refusal to rely on chemicals, their rejection of genetically modified crops, and their suspicion of large agriculture and food companies. In these respects, we might say they almost constitute an orthodoxy--a group of people who share values and perspectives and who protect their boundaries. But they also constitute a discourse community--they are a voluntary association brought together because of common work concerns; they talk about work; they use a specialized language; they know how, where, and through what means to talk with each other (that is,they have their own forums), and they share a set of written genres that facilitate their work and interaction.
It is not possible to give a full report about this discourse community here, but we have already seen above that they have generated a new set of documents that facilitate the certification process. Consider forums for a moment. They get together twice a year, in winter and summer. During these meetings they have workshops, times when they share their organic farming techniques. They also have experts come in to talk. They eat their meals together at these meetings and share experiences around the table. Dealers in organic seeds and buyers of organic products have tables with posters set up at the conferences, and you see farmers talking with these people, almost negotiating informal agreements. Besides the conferences, they have a listserv so that they can talk to each other by email. They have a list of members with mailing addresses and phone numbers.
And genre--not only do they have certification documents, they have several how-to booklets on topics like transitioning to organic farming and rotating crops. They have a purpose and vision statement. They have "technical notes" longer documents that discuss the pros and cons and draw position statements about controversial topics, like genetically modified seeds. They have other public policy statements, like appeals to the land grant institutions to consider their charter, political statements that call for zero tolerance of contamination of foundation seeds by GMOs. During the conference, they have story times, when members get up to tell mostly humorous stories about themselves, their friends, even their animals. They have even developed a group of songs and poems they think of as their own.
In short, the organic farmers of the northern plains associated with this society form a complex and rich discourse community with their own conventional ways of communication, their own forums, and their own genres. A full analysis would require interviewing several members, collecting a variety of documents, observing their interaction in a variety of forums, and analyzing several of the documents closely to determine patterns and conventions of the genres. The analysis of documents would also require further interviews with writers and readers to determine what aspects of the documents are significant.