After a fast and furious month of writing and editing, the two new chapters (Managing and Tracking Work and Social Media) are now completed. I have also been through and added a number of additional chunks of extra content and information throughout the book. Some highlights include:

• In Chapter 2 we now also discuss methods of generating revenue to financially support your community.
• Additions to Chapter 7 for how to coordinate event attendance, create effective presentations, and deliver great talks.
• Discussion in Chapter 8 about how to react to community concerns in a structured and feedback-orientated way.
• I added a number of additional conflict and relationship scenarios to Chapter 11 and how to handle them.
• A significant new addition to Chapter 12 for how to create a community summit, using the Ubuntu Developer Summit as an outline.

Finally, I now have 12 interviews that are part of the new Community Casebook chapter. I will be announcing each of these interviews in a dedicated news story here on artofcommunityonline.org over the coming weeks. The interviews are absolutely fascinating and provide great lessons and stories in the book.

Right now I am finalizing the content and then on the 15th Feb the book will go to O’Reilly for copy-editing and will go through the entire book with a fine-tooth comb to ensure everything is looking solid.

In the meantime I am also starting to put together the press plan for publicizing the second edition. If you are a journalist who would like to cover the book, please get in touch with me.

Be sure to keep up to date with The Art of Community on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

More soon!

Joining Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), Mike Shinoda (creator of Linkin Park), Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media), Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia), Mårten Mickos (former MySQL CEO, current Eucalyptus CEO), and Mike Linksvayer (VP of Creative Commons), I am pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

Veteran filmmaker and game journalist Mark Bussler is the executive producer, director and head writer for the Classic Game Room (CGR) video game review show and series of videos which debuted in 1999 and have aired on YouTube since February 2008. Classic Game Room now boasts a family of channels with over 315 million video views and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Fans that enjoy Bussler’s laid-back and entertaining look at modern and retro video games connect with the show through the CGR web site and social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Originally launched in 1999, Classic Game Room was the first classic video game review show on the Internet and developed a cult following before its cancellation in late 2000 due lack to of funding. During the years between the show’s original cancellation and its relaunch on YouTube, Bussler produced and directed numerous feature documentaries for DVD, HDTV and television.

Mark has provided a facinating interview, and I look forward to sharing it with you all in the second edition of The Art of Community!

Can’t see it? Watch it here.

This episode talks about the two new chapters, the range of different interviews included in the second edition (Linus Torvalds, Mike Shinoda, Tim O’Reilly, Jimmy Wales, Mike Linksvayer, Mårten Mickos and more), the new additions to the events chapter and more. Enjoy!

Joining Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), Mike Shinoda (creator of Linkin Park), Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media), Mårten Mickos (former MySQL CEO, current Eucalyptus CEO), and Mike Linksvayer (VP of Creative Commons), I pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

This will be with Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia. Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles (over 3.82 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors.

Wikipedia has become one of the world’s most well-known collaborative communities, and Jimmy Wales had a primary role in the site’s success. Jimmy was also named by TIME as one of 2006′s most influencial people in the world. I look forward to sharing his insights in the second edition of The Art of Community.

Joining Linus Torvalds (Linux), Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), Mårten Mickos (MySQL/Eucalyptus), and Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons), I pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media, a diverse company with a goal to spread the knowledge of innovators. O’Reilly started doing this via the publication of books (The Art of Community is published by O’Reilly), many of which are the best known books in the technology field. O’Reilly has since diversified into conferences (e.g. OSCON, Strata, TOC, Velocity, and Where), organizing the popular FooCamp gathering of leading minds in the industry, and with their O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures firm.

Tim O’Reilly has also been seen as a thought leader on change and innovation in technology. He was a driver in the adoption of Web 2.0 and has been a proponant of social media, and particularly Twitter.

In his insightful interview for The Art of Community I talk to Tim about social media, how he discovered it, how he sees the disruptive potential of it, how it has affected his work and communities, and how he manages it in his life. I look forward to sharing Tim’s thoughts with you soon!

Joining Linus Torvalds (Linux), Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), and Mårten Mickos (MySQL/Eucalyptus), I pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

This one will be with Mike Linksvayer, who serves as Vice President of Creative Commons. Mike originally joined Creative Commons as their Chief Technical Officer in 2003 and then became Vice President in 2007. Previously he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data service.

The Creative Commons has gone us to really redefine how we can share, remix, and collaborate around media, and the organization has not only defined a clear set of licenses (of which The Art of Community uses one of them), but also worked to encourage media creation, and the ubiquitous growth of Free Culture. Mike has delivered a fascinating interview that touches on how the Creative Commons was formed, how it has grown it’s global community, and the obstacles it has surpassed in challenging how the industry approaches what we can do with music, video and other media.

I just wanted to offer say a quick thank-you to everyone who submitted errata for the first edition of The Art of Community. This errata was collected here and I just fixed all of these small issues in the second edition. I am now going to see if O’Reilly can confirm each of the submissions from that page.

Thanks to Ron Gill, Sherry, Dan Scott and the many anonymous contributors for taking the time to help make The Art of Community better by letting us know about these small issues.

Hot on the heels of the recent interview announcements with Linus Torvalds and Mårten Mickos, I am delighted to announce that Mike Shinoda principal songwriter, rapper, keyboardist, vocalist and rhythm guitarist of Linkin Park has contributed an awesome interview that will be in the second edition of The Art of Community.

I was introduced to Mike a while ago by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine (who is writing the foreword for the second edition of The Art of Community) as Mike has been exploring many facets of community, technology, and collaboration in his work. He has been actively involved in growing a global Linkin Park community, coordinating community resources and media, ensuring the band has a close connection with fans, and more. He has also spoken extensively about social media and the role of large record companies in the modern music industry.

Outside of Linkin Park, Mike also formed Fort Minor as a side project, is an active artist and painter, and has produced a number of albums.

His interview provides fascinating reading, and I look forward to you all checking it out in the second edition of the The Art of Community when it is released next year!

Hot on the trail of yesterday’s confirmation of Linus Torvalds, I am delighted to announce that Mårten Mickos will also be contributing an interview to the second edition of The Art of Community. Mårten was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MySQL AB, senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems, is a member of the board of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale, and Entrepreneur In Residence at Benchmark Capital. Currently he is CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the company behind the Eucalyptus open-source cloud infrastructure.

Mårten brings many years of experience of working in a senior role in companies that have a close relationship with a collaborative community. He has shared his thoughts on the opportunity of community for companies, how companies and can communities work together, how to meet the needs of both corporate and community stakeholders, how to balance community relations as a company grows, and what to look for in a community manager.

I look forward to sharing his thoughts in the second edition of The Art of Community!

Keep up to date with The Art of Community on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+!

For the second edition of The Art of Community I am going to be including a series of short interviews dispersed throughout the book with people who have been at the forefront of different types of community. These interviews provide additional perspective, interesting context, and help to illustrate other ideas and experience on how we can build great communities.

I will be announcing who is participating in these interviews over the coming weeks, but I am pleased to announce that the first person I have interviewed is Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, and arguably the father of much of the Linux movement.

In his interview I ask him how Linux got started, how he has dealt with the sheer growth of his community, his views on governance, and the lessons he has learned over the years. It makes for some fantastic reading and I look forward to you all checking it out when the second edition is released next year!