TribeCon kicks off conversation about Community

This week in New Orleans kicks off an important conversation about Tribe Building.  TribeCon will be held October 29-30 in New Orleans, Louisiana in partnership with the Voodoo Experience. The conference will feature inspiring and educational presentations by world-renown panelists. All panels will focus around building community online and offline, and leveraging communities to accomplish amazing things.

The lineup includes conversations about failure and community, microcontent communities, how to Rawk a new community,  community across contexts (both online and offline themes) and many others.   Sounds like a lot of fascinating topics.   As an added benefit, the conference is co-located with the Voodoo Experience - a New Orleans Music Fest featuring top tier talent. 

I'll be watching @TribeCon on Twitter, but I've been able to watch Chris Schultz and TIffany Starnes, co-founders of TribeCon create a community to help them build this conversation.  They've done a remarkable job.  

I'll also be using this as a kickoff to my series on conversations about community building.  I've asked some of the best community builders to answer five questions about community building.   As a guy who keeps trying to get the community building formula right, these are some of the insights I'm hoping Tribecon will help answer this week! 

1) How would you characterize successful communities you've helped to build?

2) what are hallmarks of building a "strong community"?

3) what are some of your community building best practices?

4) what roles need to be filled early during a communities growth?

5) what helps sustain a community over time?

Before I start blogging the community builder responses I received,  I'd love to hear your thoughts on community building.  Do you have answers to any of these questions?   What other questions would you ask community builders? 

Comments

[Tim]

Thanks for the pub for TribeCon- http://www.thevoodooexperience.com/2009/tribecon.php

I have been involved in several business formations but have yet to lead a Mass success. Currently my efforts are to recruit and unite a volunteers for a Helping Hands Charity via MySpace.com/TimFrentz. I will post answers to these questions soon but right now I am on a shared computer at the Library and someone is waiting for the computer.