A few weeks back I had the pleasure of doing an interview on the rather excellent FLOSSWeekly podcast with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz. On it I talk Community, Ubuntu, Art Of Community, Canonical, Severed Fifth and more. Check it out here.

Quick note: tomorrow (Wed 15th April) at 11am Pacific I will be doing my first real live video cast here discussing various topics including Ubuntu, the Jaunty release, Art Of Community and the Community Leadership Summit.

I will also be fielding your community questions in the video cast: you can ask them in the chat channel that is on that page. Hope to see you there!

Just a quick message to let you all know that today I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 on the 18th and 19th July 2009 in San Jose, California. The event takes place the weekend before OSCON in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The goal is simple: if those passionate about building great communities can get together to compare notes and discuss and debate these topics, we will all benefit from better communities.

The summit gathers together community managers, leaders and organizers as well as the projects, organizations, commercial vendors, ISVs and others who have an interest in building a strong and enabled community. The purpose of the event is to get everyone together to talk about the many nuances of building strong and effective community, such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and more.

The event is very much a summit: it’s primary focus is around discussion. It will be run in the style of an unconference; a clear and open schedule in which attendees can volunteer sessions and engage with other attendees. This will ensure the summit packs in a healthy chunk of diversity, covering a wide range of topics and perspectives. In addition to the discussions the summit will feature some scheduled presentations, panel discussions and social events.

The event is entirely free, but you need to pre-register here. You can read more about the event at www.communityleadershipsummit.com.

In its first day day many community managers have signed up to attend such as Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier (OpenSuSE Community Manager – Novell), Dave Neary (GNOME Foundation Board Member – Neary Consulting), Brian Proffitt (Community Manager – Linux Foundation), David “Lefty” Schlesinger (Linux Foundation Mobile Advisory Board, GNOME Foundation), Karsten Wade – (Fedora Community Leader – Red Hat) and John Mark Walker (Community Manager – Collab.net). Rock and roll.

Recently the tubes have been ablaze with chatter of where the somewhat popular topic of community management should fit into an organisation. When the coin is flipped, said chatterers have been debating whether to place their bets on either Marketing and Engineering as an apt destination for the reporting line. Do we expect our community managers and representatives to report to the Director Of Marketing or the Chief Technical Officer? More specifically, when you bring a community manager into your organisation, which of these two teams do you feel can most effectively support and enable a community builder to actually build a great community?

In recent months the word community has become quite the buzzword in the Open Source business world. Its presence is felt more and more at conferences, in papers, on blogs and across the current global Twitter sensation. Irrespective of the medium, this explosion of interest in community has happened for three closely interlinked reasons.

• Firstly, community is implicitly a positive word. It speaks of openness, participation, awareness, and an agreeable intention to engage in an environment driven by merit. For Open Source companies, this is powerful inferred meaning that speaks well to their audience. As such it makes entire sense for a company to light up their website like a Christmas tree with references to “community“.
• Secondly, community has become synonymous with “engagement in the Open Source space”. Open Source companies are fully aware that if they don’t have an answer for their community relations strategy, they simply won’t be taken seriously by a significant demographic of people. Whereas five years ago this demographic of people was often seen as strange hygienically-challenged bespectacled nerds who lived in their mother’s basement adorned with Buffy The Vampire Slayer posters, it is now well known that those with buying capacity and/or influence are placing importance in the community attributes of Open Source . These are real customers who have developed this value expectation due to the constantly re-enforced Open Source mantra of participation, community and technical quality. When the industry cradles Open Source and its associated values, the big cats in the ecosystem need to adjust to reflect that.
• Finally, irksome economic times have resulted in very real consequences for small businesses. Executives have been forced to re-assess how they can achieve their goals and ambitions with a more painful awareness of the bottom line. Multiple Marketing and Engineering people can be expensive, a lot more expensive than a Community Manager.

The amalgamation of these attributes has presented a strong commercial justification of community and those who can build it, and a set of expectations around what these community builders can deliver. And here folks, lies the problem.

In every industry certain words that once had reasonably obvious illustrative attributes and consequences have subsequently become colloquial references. We have seen this extensively with trademarks: Aspirin, the Hoover, Cellophane, Thermos and even Heroin were all once trademarked to specific companies (Bayer, Hoover Company, DuPoint, Thermos GmbH and Friedrich Bayer & Co respectively). Using Hoover as an example, in England many people will refer to any brand of vacuum cleaner as a “hoover”. At one point in time a “hoover” though would point to a very specific representation of focus, quality and expectation in a vacuum cleaner that was driven by the Hoover Company. Since then the trademark has been somewhat genericized in different parts of the world and what some refer to as a “hoover” will often bear no actual resemblance to the focus, quality and expectation of a product that would come from the Hoover Company.

Similar risks around mis-guided expectations are arguably facing community managers. We need to be careful that with all of the buzz, focus and excitement around community management that we don’t step over, hide or downplay the very real day to day focus of this work in favour of academically pleasing social science. If we unseat this balance, we face the risk of genericizing community management as “the theory of working with groups of similar interests” as opposed to connecting the term firmly with hands-on best practise in building real communities that do real measurable work.

Recently much of the rhetoric around community has been presented in a generic and somewhat ethereal way. Many people have stood on many stages and many blog entries have been written by even more people that speak to the theoretical, buzz-word entrenched social architecture of community, but unfortunately fall short of the details of how they actually build a community. Of course, this theory and social science is hugely important and I would never wish to demote it’s piece of the picture, but it does represent a piece as opposed to the picture as a whole. The rest of the picture (in the Open Source space) is filled with the nuts and bolts of collaboration.

The essence of great Open Source community is in great collaborative processes, infrastructure and opportunities that help drive a united team of contributors in a shared direction. When your community can get their hands on freely available and powerful tools, simple and non-bureaucratic processes, have a world of great opportunities to contribute to in different, diverse and exiting ways, and have their contributions recognised, a powerful and productive community flourishes.

Getting back to the puzzle that we set out to explore at the start of this post, community management is a tale with both Marketing and Engineering story lines flowing through it. If one is missing, community can feel unbalanced, misrepresented and ineffective. We should always seek to celebrate and market the opportunities and importance of community, but that means nothing if you are not willing to roll up your sleeves and build and re-enforce the collaborative groundwork in your community.

My recommendation for the Open Source businesses uncertain of how to move forward: ensure your community manager is well versed in the mechanics and technical/social foundations of collaboration in Open Source communities and ensure he or she is able to strategically structure and execute on objectives that enable your community on the ground to do great work. Ensure your community manager has a close connection to your technical leaders, but also have a close connection with your marketing department to help them articulate and express your community story.

Tiny Plug: Keep an eye out for my up and coming book on effective community management – the Art Of Community to be published by O’Reilly in Summer.

While writing a chapter on governance for the Art Of Community, I kick off the chapter with the wonderful story of how Mike Basinger, a volunteer who has never worked for Canonical Ltd, has been able to serve on two of the most significant governance bodies in the Ubuntu community. I think the story itself speaks well for the Ubuntu governance infrastructure; an infrastructure that other Open Source projects have also been building on for their own communities too.

I asked Mike what excited him about the Ubuntu community and he described it eloquently:

“What excites me about the community governance is the sense that Ubuntu is a community of thousands of people from every country, race, sex, and religion who have got together and said ‘we want computing to be this way’. Linux and Open Source has enabled this as opposed to what Microsoft or Apple tell you. It is the sense that our community’s governance is open and anyone who wants to contribute can and has a say in the direction of Ubuntu. It is that the community’s main focus is to help each other, be that is write code, create documentation, or answer questions from our users.”

That made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up.

Just to let you folks know, I have signed up for identi.ca with the username jonobacon. I am posting to both identi.ca and Twitter using the glorious Gwibber, originally from my friend and yours, Ryan Paul.

Some of you have emailed to ask what I am using to write the Art Of Community, and some of my Free Software friends out there have been asking if Free Software tools were used when writing the content. Oh yes.

I am writing the book on an Ubuntu laptop and using OpenOffice.org version 3.0. Inside OpenOffice.org I am using a special O’Reilly toolbar in a template which helps me format the content in a way that will make typesetting easier later in the process. When I have completed writing content it gets saved to my disk and I then commit my revisions to a Subversion repository at O’Reilly. This allows my editors and I to all have access to the same content.

In terms of editing, it is also performed in OpenOffice.org, making use of its change tracking and notes features. This functionality is more than suitable for working on a book. I am also pleased to see this is being further refined in OpenOffice.org 3.1 with the ability to reply to notes. Interestingly, one of my editors uses Microsoft Word to edit. This means that my original .odt file is converted to a .doc file, edits are made in Word (using change tracking and notes) and then saved back in .odt format. It all works flawlessly, with the exception of having to re-import the O’Reilly toolbar. Pretty nifty, eh?

I am also making extensive use of Tomboy to store notes throughout the book development. I use it to have my book outline (which I regularly add new ideas to as I write), as well as other general notes, TODO items and more. Finally, I use the GIMP for imagery, diagrams and screenshots.

Where are you going to be at 1.30pm on Sat 21st Feb 2009?

I know where I will be. I will be speaking at the always excellent SoCal Linux Expo in Los Angeles. There I will be delivering my talk Building Belonging, exploring the underlying recipe behind behind what makes great community and babbling on about many of the concepts that my team have used as part of the Ubuntu community. The presentation takes a fun and anecdote laden tour-de-force of community in a way that any community can implement. Be there or be square!

SCALE is a fantastic conference and well worth the trip to the city of angels. I am looking forward to seeing everyone there again!

Today I am proud as punch to announce the Art Of Community.

A while back I was approached by Andy Oram, a senior editor at O’Reilly to write a definitive book about how to grow, build and energise a community. This book will be called the Art Of Community.

The book covers a wide range of topics designed to build strong community. This includes the structure and social economy behind community, building effective and easy to use infrastructure, setting up community processes, creating buzz and excitement, governance, conflict resolution, scalability and more.

This book is much more than merely a textbook on building a compelling community. I believe that we learn how to build strong community through the exchange of stories and experiences. We all have great insight into community. These stories are illustrative vessels for important lessons and subtleties in how great communities work. The Art Of Community is a compendium of stories, anecdotes and experiences inside and outside the Open Source world. These stories illustrate the many concepts scattered throughout the book, and many of these stories will include some of you reading this and your projects.

I am currently part-way through the writing process, and we have an expected release date this summer.

The release of Art Of Community is actually rather exciting. The book will be available in two forms.

• Firstly, there will be a normal printed copy available to buy. This will be available from the usual places you can buy O’Reilly books.
• Secondly, The book will also be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. This provides everyone with the opportunity to share, modify and re-use the content.

O’Reilly has my utmost respect for embracing the Creative Commons. This is a great opportunity for O’Reilly, Creative Commons content and community building.

In addition to the announcement, I am also pleased to announce a website devoted to the book over at www.artofcommunityonline.org.

The website will feature updates, sneak peeks of the content, profiles of the topics and stories in the book, profiles of the editors and proof readers and more. I am really keen to hear your stories and experiences, and there will be plenty of opportunities to get involved in the discussion. Also, when we release the book, the top ten posters with the most number of comments on the articles there will get a free signed printed copy of the book.

So, exciting times. Lots of work, but exciting times nonetheless. Lets get rolling…