There is a popular modern saying you have probably heard many times: we are more connected today and yet more alone than ever before.
It's a catchy turn of phrase.
But is it really true?

There is an economic principle called the 80/20 rule. The principle states that, in almost any area, 20% of your inputs will yield 80% of your results. This is also true in communities. Even if a handful of people do "the work" in your community, it is impossible to create meaningful outcomes without the entire group.

Trust is the key to community-building. How many times have you heard someone say that? What we often don't know is how it gets built. Here is some of what I have learned about how trust gets built.

Imagine you’ve just moved across the country. You know no one except your partner and dog, who moved with you. You want to get involved in local community efforts, make new friends, find a job, and continue your hobbies. Where do you begin?

Making a huge decision like this requires a lot of yeses and even more noes. Ultimately, that’s what any commitment requires: saying yes to one thing and no to most everything else.

The most impactful communities for participants are the ones where members get to perform a meaningful part of their identity. Often, they have very little room outside of that community to perform that identity, so they look to the community as a place where expression is celebrated.

From 2015 to 2017, Canada accomplished the seemingly impossible. The number of people living in poverty in Canada dropped by 20% in just those two years. It’s an incredible feat, and community-building underpinned the entire effort.

If you want to validate and construct a new brand community program, you can do that work in just four weeks. This is how: When you're launching any new community effort, think of filling a treehouse, not a stadium.

As Priya Parkers says: “You will have begun to gather with purpose when you learn to exclude with purpose. Over-inclusion is a symptom of deeper problems — above all, a confusion about why you are gathering and a lack of commitment to your purpose and your guests.”

Can gamification be powerful for incentivizing social connection, rather than group competition, meaningless engagement, or task completion?

I hope that the future of community is splintered and that power becomes distributed. But what does that look like?

Great community spaces create powerful recruiting engines.

Want to know how Airbnb's community has been so successful? The Community Commitment Curve is a framework every single community builder can use in their work.

30 tips and tricks from the founders of ProductHunt, Quibb, and The Fetch. These are the key learnings from the SFCMGR event on June 4. If you couldn't make it, here's what you missed.