Thinking in Public
Community is not a metric, community comes from the soul. (I heard this on a podcast recently — My First Million.)
Fifteen years ago I thought about starting a religion. Really. It started as a blog called The Art of Thanks. The idea was a daily practice: give thanks, publicly, for what we had, together.
It was a practice I wanted to develop. I just always felt like I'd procrastinate on it — and I did. I wasn't good at leading it. I guess I didn't care enough.
That's the key to any real community: strong leadership. The leader has to fully believe in the mission, embody the rituals and the language before anyone else will bother to. It grows from there.