Customer Reviews

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice)

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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.

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.

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.

In The Art of Community, Jono Bacon tackles the task of explaining how to attract, build and maintain productive collaborative online communities. Bacon has had impressive credentials to author such a book and draws from his experience skillfully. With over ten years experience in the open source community he has the hands-on experience with initiatives such as community manager for Ubuntu, KDE and OpenAdvantage.

The book is organised logically with a healthy selection of applied chapters in designing a strategy, understanding the sociological aspects behind community formation, through understanding community health and dealing with issues that arise. Bacon freely admits that this is an absolutely fluid non-science in constant evolution and stays well to the principles couched in his own experience.

I like the lyrical style of the book. Bacon keeps the prose surprisingly light for the nature of the topic (i.e. he could easily fall to using too much jargon to impact a scientific palour - he effectively avoids this). I like his constant interjections from personal experience and informal language. Sections are kept shorter and readable and he has made an attempt to distill learning into a series of specific and focus points. Additionally he carries a useful thread through his narrative reminding the reader at regular instances of what has been covered and where we should be at in the process of understanding. Notwithstanding this he does not attempt to imply that there is a tried and proven process that will lead to success, instead suggesting that he is sharing one path of many. The definition of this path is well illustrated and logically delineated. The basis is provided for each and thus allow for individual adjustment or judgement of whether it is applicable.

This book effectively combines the philosophical with the technical specifics. Although generally aimed at the strategic level in the chapter on 'Supporting Workflow with Tools' for example, Bacon provides constructive and useful real world examples of hands-on use with specific tools, and consistently ties these to the larger principles of change management process in light of the wider principles of assessment and response.

This a useful book not just for those directly charged with the the emerging task of community manager, but also those that have the vision to realise the importance of maintaining community whether they are on the financial or marketing side of the organisation.

I would further recommend this book as a less detailed read for those hoping to quickly grasp the importance of the task and the evolution of the marketplace in the era of Enterprise 2.0.

I must confess that Jono Bacon actually caught me by surprise. While I was following the creation process of the book (O'Reilly invited UG leaders to send feedback) I could have never imagined I would one day have something so useful for someone who deals with communities on a day to day basis. In this universe Jono is a well known figure, with vast experience in managing and participating in online communities, which credits him as a perfect candidate to write a book like this one.

A book about how to manage and live amongst virtual communities has all the elements to be a boring book full of "do's and don't's", in summary a very repetitive and unpleasant book. However Jono proves his understanding of the communication channels (important part of any community) right off the bat in the book's introduction. Here he showcases his writing strategy, *telling personal experiences*. Building on top of this premise the author goes throughout the book presenting us with new concepts or strategies and following it up with a real life example from his and others' experience in communities. This makes the book a delightful read, easy and flowing, the kind of book you can pickup anywhere and have fun while you plow through the pages, perfect for the everyday life of lines and waiting. I recommend loading it up on your e-reader if you got one.

The book is incredibly broad and valid for numerous roles inside every community, from managers to members, volunteers, to the regular Open Source developer. Each level of the community stands to gain from this book and even people who work with or use the community, such as marketing people, and activists who need to learn how to communicate and win-over the communities. Each chapter dives into a different and fundamental aspect, like communication, building buzz, measuring, events and handling conflicts.

Anyone who has ever managed a community and looks at this table of contents will surely have a few flashbacks of various moments in their experience, I know I for one identified myself in quite a few situations, from my motivation to participate in the PHP community to the conflicts and the experience of contributing to Open Source. I usually like to give more details of each chapter when I do reviews like this one, but in this case that feels like I would be cheating the reader from the amazing experience of having Jono lead you through his experiences and concepts, so i'll not do it.

In summary, if you have any involvement with virtual communities, be it as a manager, member or just someone who interacts with them, this book should have its place in your shelf. Buy it, read it, enjoy it an have fun while you learn to take your community to the next level.

Published originally at: [...]

Having read this book cover to cover since release I wish it had been around in 1999 when we started what would become an enormous Open Source project covering all five continents. Jono has a priviledged position of seeing people like me heading up projects and doing it badly - actually let me redefine badly - abominably.

This book could have been written for me. I kid you not. I wouldn't have anywhere near as many grey hairs as I do now (mind you Jono has a fine head of hair...) had this book existed 10 years ago.

If you are starting to work in the community, if you have been asked by your company to explore maybe licening your product under an OSI licence or you're curious how to avoid IRC channel conflict, 30 thread emails and popping antacids at 4am in the morning while in patch hell then you do need not just to read this book but understand why it was written.

If you've ever felt like feeding the troll, if you've ever pressed send before re-reading the body of an email only to have that cold fear of dread overtake you the minute your SMTP gateway is cackling at you, reading it after the event is not a cure.

Jono may have just redefined Linus's take on Linux coding which traditionally was always "See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky b*stard too", now it's more ET saying "Be Good...."

Seriously: If you want to avoid conflict and you want to understand how the facets and the vagries of the community can make you live or die by reputation and to get the best out of people contributing code and assistance to your project - people you're more than likely never going to meet in reality other than over IRC/Email then you need to digest this book.

Alongside Just For Fun and Accidental Revolutionaries this is one of the must reads for anyone embarking in software development.

My wife bought me this book as a surprise present, and I have to say that I have indeed enjoyed both the content and the writing style greatly, more so than the last dozen or so books I have read. In other words, this is one of the best books I have had the pleasure of owning in some time, and has earned a permanent spot on the book shelf. This one will most defintely not be seeing the inside of a book trader store, as it is as valuable as a reference as it is an overall text on the subject of community, and I'm sure I'll be referring back to it often. As he alludes to in the opening pages of this book, community could indeed be considered a "soft science", and one which is probably very difficult to write about in the first place, since there isn't a whole lot of existing documentation related to this subject. So essentially, Jono is practically starting from scratch, and does a bang up job in the process, drawing from his experience from before LugRadio all the way to his current postion as Community Manager for Canonical/Ubuntu. His ability to convey ideas and concepts in a variety of different ways (i.e. personal experiences, analogies and examples) is both extremely effective in getting the information across as well as being entertaining enough to keep the material from becoming dry, as one might normally expect from a book of this nature. If you have not yet purchased a copy of this book, I strongly encourage you to do so. I'm about halfway through it, and not only have I gleaned information valuable to my work in the free software community, but also tools which I can add to my kit in my day to day employment as a workplace manager. It's simply a great book all the way around, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who has to deal with people issues or team building in almost any capacity. I can't wait to finish it, although it will be somewhat bittersweet as it will mean that I then have to wait for his next one to be published.

"The Art of Community" is a tour de force, a brilliant start to the discussion on how to build thriving communities. The Open Source ecosystem has many concepts that can be applied to most practical business verticals and organizations. Jono defines the psychological and sociological imperatives why communities start and why people want to belong to communities.

Purchasing this book also supports Jono's continued work as a pioneer in this field, and the values of Open Source. Highly recommend!

The success of the open source software movement demonstrates that no obstacle is insurmountable when people come together around a shared vision. In 'The Art of Community', Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon gives readers a profound glimpse into his hands-on experience as the orchestrator of one of the movement's most powerful communities. His book offers valuable lessons on effective leadership and community building. Its compelling combination of useful theory, real-world best practices, and instructive personal anecdotes make it a richly comprehensive guide for both aspiring and experienced community leaders.

"Jono Bacon's The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) is a wonderful meditation on building communities using modern infrastructure tools and practices gleaned from the Free and Open Source Software movement. Jono's examples, taken from his work on Ubuntu, give a good picture of a working community and how it functions. The fact that the book is backed by a conference and an online community means this fine effort will potentially continue to grow into the watering hole for community gardeners, leaders and managers".

-- Danese Cooper, Open Source Diva and OSI Director