For almost two weeks now, I've been thinking of Anthony Bourdain every day. I've been trying to work out some of the lessons he has taught me so far about community through his work. There are many, I've realized. But what I want to share with you today is how I think his work serves as a model for the type of creative work we do: gathering people.

We cannot create rigid, homogeneous spaces where everyone believes the same thing. That's not a community; that's a cult. But we do have to put a stake in the ground: For which issues do we need to raise our voice and take a stand?

You can follow how-to posts all day, but you also need to answer these larger questions about your community work.

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

We need a framework for self-care in this profession. Here are 7 steps to take each day to take better care of #1.

We burn out because we lose all sense of ourselves. The shouts and demands and the subtle persuasion of our community members drowns out our voice. The business goals ignore what brought us to our work in the first place. We forget who we are.

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.

Last week, I started and finished the book Deepening Community by Paul Born. Born focuses mainly on offline communities and traditional community building (i.e. around neighborhoods or families), but his work extends beyond these traditional realms. We can certainly apply most of what he discusses in online-offline worlds.

When we build communities around products, we dream of creating something larger than a product or even larger than a brand name. We want to create deeper meaning in people’s lives. There are many ways to start building meaning around your product, but there is really no more effective way than empowering individual brand ambassadors to run with your vision and to better their own lives as a result. But if you’ve never done it before, how do you begin?