The dev team has a 15-minute standup. Everyone in the online classroom unmutes and greets everyone else at the same time. Someone at Codegarden shouts "Sea" and a crowd replies "Bass!"

All around the world, people do the same thing in the same way, over and over. Rituals are big pieces of the structure that transforms a group of people into "a team" or "a community." They're also sometimes the walls that make a community seem like a clique, with no room for new entrants.

And while some rituals seem to appear out of nowhere, there's actually a craft to building them, caring for them - and sometimes, to letting them go.

At Codepath, I've been working this spring on building and shaping some of the rituals that help students bond and support each other in learning. At Codegarden, we've got decades of ritual that we've built up to use as examples.

Let's talk about how ritual works, and learn to craft the right rituals to build the communities we want.