Strong, lasting, intentionally nurtured interpersonal communities will have a profound impact on how we live and work in the next decade, rivaling the impact of software services on how we communicate or the creator economy on how we consume entertainment.
I’m working to understand the dynamics of these communities – how they grow, scale, and decline – and the repeatable strategies we can learn to build better communities, more intentionally.
I’m writing extensively about these ideas here on my blog, and working on some larger projects as well to share what I learn. Below is a comprehensive list of my writing and thoughts on communities and community building.
Blogs
The future of community: a future for communities, on my thesis that intentionally nurtured communities will have a profound impact on how we’ll live in the next decade and more. Given this challenge and potential, I think we’ve got some big problems to tackle. I share some of these ideas here.
Communities are micro-economies, on how strong communities create a different sense of value within the group that creates small micro-economies within them.
To build a community, elevate the storytellers, on the paramount importance of collective memory, storytelling, and oral tradition in how communities grow and retain a cohesive identity.
A cellular theory of communities, on how communities can scale fearlessly by creating layers of smaller “cells” of communities, and the reason structure is important to scaling communities without fracturing.
How to kill the university, on the idea of super-communities, communities that beget and birth new diverse communities, and how universities are great examples of them. I make the case that, to truly disrupt the cultural institution of the four-year university, an alternative idea must be a better factory for communities than university ecosystems.
Where Cal founders come from, a case study on the difference between formally created “over-the-ground” systems to help entrepreneurs at UC Berkeley, and the “underground” decentralized communities where ideas and new companies take root.
Where, what, and why – what creates powerful communities? A question that leads to insights about the motivations and sense of purpose that fuel strong communities that last over time and trouble.
Threads
My big ideas about how good communities are built, a Twitter-sized summary of a book I’m working on about community building.
How to bootstrap and scale a startup community on university campuses, going over five big learnings from conversations with university admins, students, founders, and investors from campuses across the US and beyond.