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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good book with a misleading title, January 18, 2010
This review is from: The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) (Paperback)
Jono Bacon's book makes a very interesting reading despite the misleading title.
I manage a few online communities and I was interested in learning from an experienced professional (Jono) how to improve my communities and my management style. The title of the book, as well many of the reviews I read were very positive. Only after reading a few dozen pages I recognized that this was not the book I was expecting. "The Art of community" is not about all online communities, it's only about online communities for open-source software. Great topic if your community is about developing some piece of software in an open-source context, but not very useful if your community is a group of people sharing a common interest but not working together toward a common goal. Jono tries to generalize his experience for a wider audience presenting a few non-open-source cases and examples.
But it's evident he has neither experience to support such generalization nor a real interest in adventuring outside the familiar open-source territory. If your community is an open-source community, get the book and religiously read every single word of it. If your community is about cars, movies, commercial software, or something else save your time and your money.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A practical guide to community building, and a brave experiment, October 3, 2009
This review is from: The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) (Paperback)
Solidly grounded in theories of social capital formation, this book offers practical advice on how to build communities, on earth as well as online. You can almost just copy and paste the ideas, checklists, todo lists and best practices tips, then apply them to your community-building effort. I've been a community organizer for more than 20 years, but I learned something new in each chapter. I wish I had this book sooner, would've help me avoid mistakes, and do a bunch of things better (maybe I should have reviewed this anonymously).
Am particularly impressed at the courage it took to also offer this book as a free download, with a liberal Creative Commons license. The pdf format is what's most useful to me - I'm literally able to copy and paste, and shape whole sections of the book so they fit my organization's needs. I might not have bought the book if it was just a book. But because I love the pdf, I bought the ipod version (which I'll probably never use, since all I can do with it is read and, okay, click on links, but I felt obliged to pay something). Hats off to O'Reilly.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the art of community, October 2, 2009
This review is from: The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) (Paperback)
Really loved this book. Although focused on open source software, the art of community is interesting to a more general audience. It's easy to read, and has some great specifics about how to build a community of volunteers, what motivates people to join, how to channel that energy etc. Has lots of examples to help keep things real.
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