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 build communities, you're bound to push yourself a little too hard sometimes. You do it because you care. There is so much good in that.

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.

Perfect. What an irrelevant word for the kind of work we do. Community building demands imperfect work. What an irrelevant word, in fact, in any world where equality and justice matter.

Lessons on community building from the catastrophe of the Fyre Festival

A list of 9 books to kickstart your professional development in community.

As more of the world comes online, our approaches to design and leadership will need to grow more decentralized and localized to remain both inclusive and effective. That's probably not news to you, but the idea does feel more urgent today as the next billion people are quickly coming online.

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of attending an annual community ritual hosted by a small business located near Seattle, WA. A new friend invited me to observe but told me he didn't want me to know what was going to happen at the event until I got there.

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?

This week, I don't want to invite you to ponder anything or do anything extra. I just want to invite you to breathe deeply.

We may need a mindset shift: If you show up and do the work, you will not get every opportunity or acknowledgment, but this is not a zero-sum game. We share our triumph. Scarcity is a reality, but it’s not the only reality.

Four Stanford data scientists analyzed thousands of conflicts on Reddit using public data from 2014–2017. As a result, they were able to suggest a data-backed model for mediating intercommunity conflict.