By “community” I think they refer to everyone who volunteers - so the entire Viki volunteer community.
From what I understand, the entire community will have benchmarks (levels).
Level 1: 0 - 250.000 contributions
Level 2: 250.001 - 1M contributions
etc.
These benchmarks are in a way replacing weeks (1, 2, 3 and 4) from our previous seg-subathon.
Initially, while the entire community is contributing and building up to Level 1, each contributor is simultaneously also fighting for their own badge in Level 1. They will have time to contribute for individual Level 1 badge only until the entire community reaches 250.000 contributions.
When the community reaches Level 1 and starts contributing towards Level 2, each contributor will now start to contribute for the second individual, Level 2 badge. I am assuming that individual contributions are not going to be carried from one level to the next, but reset.
We will always have a full overview of how much we contribute as a community. So, if you see that we are reaching the next goal rather quickly, and you haven’t reached your individual goal for the badge, you know you have to hurry up.
Who ever designed the new seg-subathon system is clever. It will put significantly more pressure on us, because we are trying to contribute to get the highest badge available, but at the same time we are shortening the time deadline for ourselves and others.
This would be even more fun if we didn’t know how many total contributions the community had 
Now, what’s interesting is that for the previous seg-subathon we had 4 weeks to reach 2.7 M contributions, while they expect us to do 2 M this time in just 2.5 weeks. 
Have you done your calculations correctly, @vikicommunity? 
Edit: Regarding the calculations for global community contributions, I forgot we had the winter seg-subathon which lasted for 14 days. With 2.7 M conrinutions in total and assuming steady speed of contributions, it means that we will reach:
-
Level 1 (250.000 contributions) in 1.3 days
-
Level 2 (1 M) in 5.2 days
-
Level 3 (1.5 M) in 7.8 days
-
Level 4 (2 M) in 10.3 days
And by the end of the marathon (16 days total), we might actually reach 3 M contributions! That would be something 