Trustroots

Introducing Trustroots Tribes

Today we’re introducing Trustroots Tribes. A Tribe is a group of people on Trustroots with similar interests.

How do you build a trust network that can scale up when it grows bigger? This question has occupied our minds for a long time. This started long before we actually founded Trustroots, when working on and using similar networks. In the initial phase we focused on getting especially hitchhikers on board and making the site ideal for that. It was a straightforward way of getting initial traction. Today Trustroots is over 16 000 members strong. We chose this approach because we know a lot of hitchhikers and 2 of us have been heavily involved in building up Hitchwiki.

Now it’s time for the next level!

Trustroots Tribes

We want a world that encourages trust, adventure and intercultural connections.

Trustroots Tribes are groups that you can associate yourself with on Trustroots. We’re starting with twelve tribes: Hitchhikers, Nomads, Vegans & Vegetarians, Punks, Hackers, Dumpster divers, Lindyhoppers, Buskers, Families, Ecoliving, Musicians and LGBT.

If you’re a coder you probably want to join the hackers tribe. As a musician you join the tribe of musicians. It’s not necessary to be actively involved in the tribe activity presently. For example, I have hitchhiked a whole lot in my life but these days I hardly find time to try to catch a ride somewhere. I still heavily identify myself with hitchhikers, I enjoy hanging out with people who hitchhike and thus I will join the tribe.

“I only like hitchhikers”

We realize that many people want to stick only to one or two specific Trustroots tribes. Having some control over who you want to interact with (or not) is important for better experience. More so if Trustroots grows bigger, as we would unavoidably become more mainstream as well. Already now we are seeing signs of people joining who don’t really identify themselves as hitchhikers. That’s fine, it’s not really something we could stop happening anyway. So far we’ve assumed those people are fine hosting hitchhikers.

We emphasize community.

We want everyone to be able to have that small site’s cozy community feeling no matter how different people join Trustroots.

Future

At first stage, you will be able to join tribes and they will show up at your profile. We will soon provide functionality to only allow people from your own tribes to interact with you.

We expect that for the coming two years most people will choose to be open to everyone on the network.

In the near future we want to allow you to find members from map who belong to a specific tribe.

We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency.

For now we’ve also decided to just have these 12 tribes, see how things grow and develop before setting up new tribes. When we’re ready for that it will probably be a staged process. A tribe will be in an incubating phase until it reaches certain number of members. We don’t want to have a large number of very similar tribes nor we want to have members scattered to tiny tribes. Instead, what we want is to create a convenient way to create connections that inspire, that increase trust around the globe. So at some point we’ll have an acroyoga tribe and you will automatically start meeting fellow acroyoga enthusiasts. Meanwhile we’ll also encourage people to look beyond their own tribes, to create intertribal and intercultural connections.

To avoid that one person is in charge of a tribe and can do whatever they want, or simply disappear, we decided to implement a more dynamic way of organisation. A model we’ve learned to work well with on Hitchwiki.

We want you to be able to go to a new place and immediately connect with people that you will have a great time with. Likewise when you’re home or just walking around in your own town.

Join Tribes

Invite everyone from your community to join Trustroots as well!

Missing a tribe? Send us your suggestions.