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

Jono Bacon (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)

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Book Description

August 24, 2009 0596156715 978-0596156718 1

Online communities offer a wide range of opportunities today, whether you're supporting a cause, marketing a product or service, or developing open source software. The Art of Community will help you develop the broad range of talents you need to recruit members to your community, motivate and manage them, and help them become active participants.

Author Jono Bacon offers a collection of experiences and observations from his decade-long involvement in building and managing communities, including his current position as manager for Ubuntu, arguably the largest community in open source software. You'll discover how a vibrant community can provide you with a reliable support network, a valuable source of new ideas, and a powerful marketing force.

The Art of Community will help you:

  • Develop a strategy, with specific objectives and goals, for building your community
  • Build simple, non-bureaucratic processes to help your community perform tasks, work together, and share successes
  • Provide tools and infrastructure that let contributors work quickly
  • Create buzz around your community to get more people involved
  • Track the community's work so it can be optimized and simplified
  • Explore a capable, representative governance strategy for your community
  • Identify and manage conflict, including dealing with divisive personalities

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The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation (Theory in Practice) + Design to Thrive: Creating Social Networks and Online Communities that Last + Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jono Bacon is an award-winning leading community manager, author and consultant. Currently the community manager for the worldwide Ubuntu community, Bacon is a regular keynote speaker, has also authored four books and acted as a consultant to a range of technology companies. Bacon's weblog (http://www.jonobacon.org/) is one of the widest read Open Source weblogs and he writes regularly about community management.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 394 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 24, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0596156715
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596156718
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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
the art of community October 2, 2009
By ggs
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Useful and exhaustive
The Art of community building is a book from practitioner. Though Jono's book talks talk about community focused around open source project but his experiences are readily... Read more
Published 6 days ago by tjain
Very interesting content
This book is unique in its content, as there is no other resource about this theme, and its format. Jono Bacon writes in a way that provides a light reading and looks... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Rodrigo Carvalho
The art of one community
This book develops the principles of community management from the perspective of the manager of a big and spread community: Ubuntu Community. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Flo
Maybe the best non-fiction I have ever read
My first exposure to Jono Bacon was when he was the host of the FLOSS Weekly podcast on the TWiT podcast network. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Kevin Gamin
Approaching Art from the Artist's Perspective
In The Art of Community, Jono Bacon tackles the task of explaining how to attract, build and maintain productive collaborative online communities. Read more
Published 16 months ago by Shawn Day
Great book on community
Great book for a foundation in community building and growing social websites. It's filled with lots of good advice and common sense. Read more
Published 17 months ago by J. Arroyo
A Incredible surprise and a learning trip
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... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Rafael Dohms
Fairly basic
Might be a good starting point for the complete novice, but as a community manager I found very little new info.
Writing was heavy on advice, light on examples. Read more
Published on January 28, 2010 by Nicholas Tolstoshev
Disapointing
I found "The Art of Community" to be rather lacking in factual information, which is not to say that it wasn't but merely that it didn't provide much in the way of supporting... Read more
Published on November 24, 2009 by John C. Berger
much more "stories", please
This book is a good reference of topics on managing community.
This is well-diciplined, objective, practical, and providing good starting points. Read more
Published on November 19, 2009 by guccii
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