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

Jono Bacon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 24, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0596156715 | ISBN-13: 978-0596156718 | Edition: 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

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: 7.1 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #530,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars A good book with a misleading title January 18, 2010

By Franco Folini

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.

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

By Leo Romero

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 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.