The gelling of truly awesome and useful communities is hard to achieve through a deterministic, step-by-step process. What I find useful to focus on is a more iterative, trial and error process along these lines:

(1) Be where communities are forming – density generally means more opportunity. Per ModusPonies, move downtown or wherever you need to be to improve your odds of achieving initial critical mass.

(2) Be prepared to adapt and flex. A community is made up of… wait for it… multiple people. Who may have somewhat different skills, goals and values and may want something similar, but different to what you were initially looking for. A tight filter and a rigid template not only lowers your odds but might lead you to miss a maximization opportunity you hadn’t thought of.

(3) Nurture the initial tender shoots of community and cherish existing high-functioning communities when you find yourself in them. Along the lines of Peopleware’s concept of “teamicide”, realize that it’s much more efficient to not disrupt, degrade or kill off existing high-functioning communities than to start over from scratch.

Hi folks --

In high school I became obsessed with Gödel, Escher, Bach; in college in the 80s I studied philosophy of language, linguistics and AI; then tracked along with that stuff on the side through various career incarnations through the 90s (newspaper production guy, systems programmer, Internet entrepreneur, etc.). I'm now a transactional attorney who helps people buy and sell services and technology and work together to make stuff -- sort of a meta-anti-Lloyd Dobler.

I'm de-lurking because I finished HP:MoR a month ago and I'm chewing through the sequences at a rapid clip; it's all resonating nicely with my decades-long marinade in a lot of the same source materials referenced in the sequences. It's also helping me to systematize a lot of ad-hoc observations I've made over the years about the role that imperfect cognition plays in my life and my corner of the legal world.

Looking forward to hanging out here with you folks!

About "how trusting should I be", I would like to quickly bring up a bit of the scientific research. I've read a bit of this, and have concluded in high certainty that individual trust gives off a decent positive externality.

Quite a bit of econometric research (yea, it's not the best, but it's what we have) shows that positive levels of trust correlate with higher economic growth.
See: http://oep.oxfordjournals.org/content/56/1/118.short http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0297.00609/abstract

However, I very much remember reading about how entrepreneurs have lower trust levels than most people on average, but can't seem to find the paper right now.

What I'd imagine is that in general trust helps society, which makes a lot of sense as it allows trade to function. However, it may very well be that the level of trust optimal for an individual is quite lower than that optimal for his or her society. Makes sense if trust is looked at similar to altruism.

In this case, obviously the more trust people have with other people and their bags, the more cases of stealing that will occur. On the whole this may help your surrounding people, as some of these will benefit from stealing. However, the disadvantage would come to yourself at the expected cost of having your stuff stolen.

It would be interesting to factor in not only how much your bags being lost would cost you, but how much they would benefit the person who steals them.