Friends, today I am proud to throw over the microphone to a guest blogger who is a member of the Art Of Community family: Andy Oram.

Andy is one of the editors of the book and has written a fascinating piece called Lobbyists’ tricks: the difference between coalition-building and community-building. Enjoy!

It seems strange that I would think about communities while reading So Damn Much Money, a new book by Robert G. Kaiser that traces the rise of high-stakes lobbying and cash-driven political campaigning over the past thirty-five years.

Everybody in Kaiser’s book is engaged in the pursuit of either money or a narrow ideological cause. There seems to be nothing about respect for ordinary people, tolerance for diverse opinions, the pursuit of common goals, or any of the things we talk about on this site and others when we discuss communities.

But would you believe it? When lobbyists do their job, there are things that make me think, “Hey, we do that too.” I’m involved in many online communities and am part of Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, the Boston arm of the community organizing movement. And superficially, some of these lobbyist activities did seem similar.

Eventually I realized that coalition-building–which is what the lobbyists and the campaign donors who seek favors do–is fundamentally different from community-building. But I think those of us who seek to build communities may fall into the trap of coalition-building. So the lessons in this blog may be valuable to you.

A major corporation or university looking for an earmark, a tax break, or relief from pesky regulations like those preventing pollution needsto build a coalition. This involves such tasks as:

• Taking a hard look at your company to assess its strengths and weaknesses. You want to ask for money that builds on your strengths or corrects your weaknesses.

• Finding leaders in your geographic area to plead your cause. It’s great to have a major company’s CEO call for the same law as the president of a major university. Or a major newspaper columnist, or a leading religious figure, or a state senator, or someone else with control over money and other resources.

• Coordinating a campaign. Figure out who the thought leaders are, and who they’re likely to listen to. The local media may pay attention to your mayor, whereas your Senator may ignore him because he’s in a different political party–but if the head of a local pharmaceutical company calls up the Senator’s office, that might be a different story.

Like community-building, coalition-building is all about relationships. To pass a bill you want the favors of the head of the relevant Senate or House committee. If your kids go to the same school as his chief aide, you have the nose of the camel in the tent. If the person who was his chief aide two years ago works for you now, the nose is more of a hump. None of this means anything without money, but the relationships are crucial.

If you do any community work, you’ll recognize here many of the central elements of community organizing. Play on your strengths, bring the right people together, etc.

But the similarities are superficial. The differences arise from one enormous gulf between coalition-building and community-building: the reason for being together.

Communities respect the needs of their members and allow ideas to bubble up from the grass roots. Furthermore, the work they do strengthens their relationships. Sometimes, the improvements in relationships outweigh any actions the communities undertake.

In contrast, coalitions are lash-ups driven by rich companies or individuals, where one person pushes a goal for his own benefit, and other hangers-on sign up to further their own personal goals. It’s “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.” The coalition disbands when the earmark is awarded, each member taking his little stash back to his hole in the ground to gnaw on.

Most of the people reading this blog don’t have a few hundred thousand dollars to slip into a Congressional campaign. But you’re still at risk of falling into some of anti-community traps. Some of the distinctions were taught to me years ago by an organizer for Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, and some were suggested by Kaiser’s book.

If we try to persuade others to support our goals instead of asking what everyone’s goals are and finding common ground, we’ve flirted with the temptation of coalition-building.

If we put the “win” above the goal of improving our relationships with our community members, we’re sliding from community-building to coalition-building.

If we value the endorsement of some industry leader or other “big name” over the efforts of dozens or thousands of everyday folks volunteering their time, we’ve abandoned the community for a coalition.

Certainly, members of coalitions form friendships along the way. I’m willing to grant these are real, heart-felt relationships. But they don’t add up in any way to a community; at best they can enrich the lives of the rich guys who form them, and at worst they’re cynical covers for future mutual back-scratching.

I recommend So Damn Much Money. Anyone who has followed American politics for a while knows the outlines of the story, but the twists and turns have a lot to teach us. Their are many villains in the book, but no one who had the power to turn around the problem. Kaiser hands out blame to all sides (Democrats and Republican, pollsters and campaign organizers, lobbyists and aides) as even-handedly as the donors hand out money.

I don’t buy every assertion Kaiser makes (for instance, did the turning point in American politics really come in June 1976 with an idea hatched by renowned chemist Jean Mayer?) but I respect his research. Luckily, we have an opportunity to fix politics that hasn’t come since Watergate, or maybe since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

A lot of it will come from communities. Let’s build them.

For the last few months Simon St. Laurent has had his feet firmly wedged into the primary editing boots for the Art Of Community. With an extensive background in community and a nose for helping to produce great writing, Simon has been helping take my stream of consciousness and refining it. I caught up with him recently to indulge in a quick interview. Internet friends, meet Simon, Simon, speak forth…

What is your involvement in the Art Of Community?

I’m editing the book, mostly helping to make sure it flows smoothly. Every tech book is, in some way, a collection of stories. This one is more fun because a lot of those stories are human, and that requires a different take than we usually apply to stories about programming.

How did you get involved in the Art Of Community project?

For the past few years, I’ve been editing a number of our books which included community, though mostly in an online “the community is the application” sense. This pushes me further toward communities in their foundation sense, a group of people together trying to accomplish something.

What experience do you have working with community?

I grew up in a small city and my parents were active in their community, but remarkably, I really didn’t notice community until later. In some ways, community is something you notice when you cross the boundaries into or out of it.

In college, I spent a lot of time working in consensus-based systems. Consensus, I think, gets a bad rap. True, it doesn’t scale well, except in like-minded communities, and it can certainly reinforce like-mindedness within communities. It has a much brighter, side, though: the ability to block consensus changes the nature of the conversation. If consensus is taken seriously, participants who object to the direction something is heading have two choices: they can block consensus, or they can share their concerns while acknowledging that the group seems to be heading in a particular direction.

Both of these scenarios obligate the other members of the group to consider the objections seriously. It’s slow and often messy, and its values are deeply different from the “hurry up and let’s get it done” that seems to dominate most group decision-making today, but as a process it shows more respect for its participants than anything else I’m aware of. It tells people that their opinions matter, and encourages them to share them. It also reminds people that while their opinions matter, they’re part of a larger group, and the decision belongs to the group as a whole, not to the individual or even a leadership group.

I spent a few years as an active participant in the XML community, online and at conferences. XML worked on a lot of common problems, but when it addressed complex problems, it frequently made them more complex. There were, I think, a lot of people who wished I’d go away, as it was all too easy to point out the gaps in XML’s creation and implementation. Eventually I did wander away, though mostly because core XML conversations seemed – and still mostly seem – locked in an endless loop of the same questions repeated over and over with little resolution. (My departure didn’t seem to change that.)

After that, I’ve spent a lot of the past few years in local politics. I was chair of my town’s Democratic Committee for four and a half years, and was happy to retire to vice-chair in December. Unfortunately, we lost a village election yesterday – we brought out a lot more voters than usual to vote for our candidates, but the Republicans also brought out more. At the town level, we’ve done a lot better, despite some ferocious attacks. Keeping a diverse group of people working together on projects in the face of opposition can be challenging, to say the least.

My family is also spending a lot of time looking at relocalization, which is inherently a conversation about community. Connecting more directly to the world immediately around you forces you to think about who you’re interacting with, why, and how to improve the interactions.

The funny thing, of course, is that I’m not that social. Crowds especially wear me out, and at some point I have to go hide out and recharge for a while.

What most excites you about the book in general?

I think there’s actually a large audience of potential readers who don’t believe that community actually works. I know far too many people who insist that the only reasons people leave their houses are to gather or spend money and goods, and who think that the Internet is basically a pleasure dome that mysteriously spawns shouting matches in the corners. The idea that people would come together – voluntarily even! – to work on common projects is hard to see unless you work in the fields where this actually happens.

Will they pick up the book? Some will because they have to, because their work has concluded that working with community models will be more effective or more efficient than keeping their ideas to themselves. That kind of opening, which is slow but persistent, will bring a lot of people to look at this book, and to look at community in a whole new light.

At the same time, I know there are a lot of people who will be happy to find what they’ve been doing confirmed, and who will be happy to see new ways of going further.

Which specific content in the book do you think will be of most interest to communities?

I think that’s going to vary pretty wildly by community. Not so much by the type of community, but rather by how organized the community already is. Communities that already have transparent processes and infrastructure built around workflow may find a lot of the book validating, while still seeing paths not taken in every chapter.

Most communities, though, aren’t like that. Even among technical communities, workflow isn’t always structured. Process isn’t clear. As work moves closer and closer to completion, more structure appears, but it isn’t necessarily structure that was planned from the outset. As we’ve seen lately, transparency hasn’t exactly been a key value of certain communities, much to all of our financial regret at this point.

Some of my favorite sections emphasize the limits of what we can accomplish by ourselves. I’ve seen too many times how one evangelist who keeps pushing a given product over and over will have vastly less effect than a large number of actual users or participants who talk about a project in ways that inspire trust rather than doubt. There’s still room for traditional announcements, but that process becomes a lot less like sending out a fax and a lot more like sharing news with friends. I especially like the recommendation that people trying to reach out to blogs should actually have a blog, “practice what you preach”, and get some understanding of the medium.

I’m also fond of the section on Units of Belonging, and how they relate to teams. They’re different, though the overlaps between them are a lot of what makes effective teams work. It’s something I’ve thought about before, but never broke down quite that clearly. The emphasis on keeping process simple also ties neatly into practices that hold teams together. When process gets too complicated, it’s hard for participants to know what’s going on. Even though most people would rather talk about substance than process, the biggest barrier to successful substance is often failing process.

Thanks, Simon!

Firstly I apologise for the lack of updates recently on the Art Of Community. The reason for this is simple: I have been feverishly working on the book! It turns out that with my normal busy schedule as Ubuntu Community Manager, work on the book and keeping the website up to date, something was going to slip a little. I am going to endeavour to keep you all updated with news though!

I also had the opportunity to attend the SoCal Linux Expo in LA where I met with Andy Oram for the first time. It was an excellent show as usual, and the excitement around the Art Of Community was fantastic. Many people came over and offered their support for the book both inside my talk and outside on the show floor. I am really excited about delivering the book and hope everyone finds it useful in building their own communities.

So where do we stand on the content? Good progress is being made on the book and I am busy working through a large chapter on Governance. The chapter will be exploring the many different approaches to governing a community, exploring how some example communities govern themselves, a case study on the Ubuntu governance model, how to set up community councils, approaches to membership, codifying your governing bodies and more. I think this is going to be one of the most anticipated and most important chapters in the book, and I am paying particular care and attention in ensuring it covers as much ground as possible.

In addition to this we are working through the edits. Stuart just got back some comments on the Processes chapter, Simon is working on the Workflow chapter and I am waiting on some further comments from some other proof reading superheroes.

More news soon!

I sat down with Andy and did a short interview with him about the Art Of Community and his other interests. Enjoy!

What is your primary role in the Art of Community?

As an editor, I often think of myself as playing Aaron to the author’s Moses. Moses knew what to say (he had even better authority for his teachings than my best authors do) but he had a speech impediment that made it hard for him to express himself. Aaron was deputized to clarify Moses’s teachings so the hoi-poloy could understand them.

What sort of interventions do I perform? All kinds. I look for places where the author jumped from one subject to another too quickly, or made questionable leaps in reasoning. I rewrite passages boldly sometimes, saying, “I think you meant to say this…” I suggest major reorganizations of material and support them by writing introductory or transitional material. (In many books that I’ve edited, the initial paragraphs of many chapters are my own.) I challenge statements by contrasting them to advice I’ve read elsewhere. And I speak from my own experience, which is especially useful in this book because I’ve participated in a wide range of powerful community experiences that I’ll explain further down in the interview.

To return to the Aaron analogy, I sometimes go too far beyond my role. “Hey, I’ve got a cool idea; let’s create this golden calf!” I always let the author have the last word, but they always let the vast majority of changes stand.

Recently we’ve brought in Simon St.Laurent as an editor too. He has his own fascinating stories to tell as an editor and an organizer.

How did you get involved in editing and how did you join O’Reilly?

For ten years I worked in conventional technical writing jobs, turning out manuals on things ranging from debugging FORTRAN programs to designing real-time X Window System applications. Many people would consider such tech writing a lost decade, but I loved it and took my work far beyond the usual that companies request.

But eventually I realized that computer companies would never invest the resources necessary to do really good documentation–it’s just a cost, not revenue-producing–so I accepted a job as editor at O’Reilly, which I got through the old boy network. I had started with a very positive experience, updating the classic book Managing Projects with Make before joining the company.

Now I’m trying to start a new venture at O’Reilly which, in a curious way, is a return to my original role in technical writing. But this time, instead of helping teams with their documentation inside companies, I want to help teams of loosely linked developers, often on open source projects. That’s the twenty-first century equivalent to working on a company team. I discuss this project here.

How did the Art Of Community project come to life?

A number of people recognize communities as central to making projects such as open source development work, and now communities are recognized by business experts as critical to successful business as well. By community, I mean a fairly stable collection of people who see themselves as contributing to some shared good and who participate to help each other. The open source team, business, or other people leading the project have to grant a lot of leeway to the community, and not try to manipulate or dictate to it. The balance between providing direction and following one’s followers is one of the themes of the book.

We tried at first to do this book as wiki, with multiple experts in the field contributing chapters and everybody being free to edit each others’ chapters. It turned out that we took the ideal of community too far. After three earnest attempts to recruit authors, we had only three chapters and these chapters weren’t coalescing into anything resembling a book.

When Jono approached me with a similar idea, offering to write the book himself, I was ready to take him up on it, and management at O’Reilly enthusiastically went along. We’re still involving the community: we’ve contacted all the people who showed interest in the original group project and will try to get interviews or short contributions from them. Jono has contacted a wide range of other leaders in this area as well, and the web site where this interview appear is part of our strategy for genuinely involving the public in the creation of the book, which will be released under a Creative Commons license.

What is your experience of community? You have been involved in a community organization for four years. Who are they and what do you do?

My experience with community goes back to about the age of five, when my parents took me to a civil rights march on the Washington Mall. That particular community effort paid off in a big way with a related event that took place on the Washington Mall this past January 20.

As I grew, I learned more about the labor movement and protests throughout history and realized the importance of working together, even while I saw the value of individual creativity.

These themes–individual contributions tied to community effort–came together in the free software movement. I learned about free software pretty early in its history as a conscious movement and have become fascinated since then with the spread of the open source idea to other areas. As part of my answers to this interview, I counted the articles I’ve put online about open source. I’ve written 109 articles on the topic! I have also studied crowd-sourcing and peer production, which are related to community.

Joining Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in the 1980s, I learned how to organize communities and political projects online.

I first encountered Saul Alinsky’s ideas on community organizing in the 1980s as well. I didn’t appreciate the power of community organizing until a few years ago, after working hard to develop a community that was very important to me: my synagogue.

Although I was born Jewish, I didn’t engage in uniquely Jewish activities until my wife and I joined the synagogue. I chose my own Hebrew name, the Hebrew equivalent of Aaron. I worked on a lot of committees in the synagogue and particularly led its social action projects, trying always to put them on a more consciously political and world-changing path. In 2005 I agreed to join a small group that would bring our synagogue into the local community organization, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.

It’s been wonderful to drive downtown and sit next to Haitian nursing home workers and other people living very different lives from me, but dealing with the same economic and social forces. This work is a salutary balance to my involvement in relatively ethereal issues like defense of the fair use exemption to copyright, or opposition to the broadening of data that can legally be caught by wiretaps without a warrant.

Our synagogue recently won an award for some of our work, but we’re even more gratified to see that the entire leadership of the synagogue (including people who were very skeptical about the money we invested in GBIO) has come around to our view of the importance and benefits of organizing for our own synagogue community.

What are the most exciting communities that you have seen recently?

In addition to ones I mentioned, I’m impressed at how FLOSS Manuals inspires authors to contribute free documentation. Among other things, they organize “sprints” where a bunch of people get together for a few days and turn out a whole book. I’m volunteering in an advisory position to them.

In these tough economic times, what are the opportunities for community?

Clearly, businesses and non-profits alike will have less money to hire professionals, so they’ll have to learn to inspire volunteers and coordinate them so as to make the most of their contributions. There will also be more needs to fill, and some people with strong talents to offer will unfortunately have more free time than they want.

And the whole thrust by President Obama toward volunteerism and involving the public in decision-making opens up opportunities on a national level for communities to make a difference. I knew from the beginning of Obama’s campaign that he was serious about bringing people together and letting solutions come from the grassroots. I think a lot of observers dismissed that talk as feel-good fluff, but I recognized in it the same Saul Alinsky community organizing methodology that I was practicing in GBIO. It’s not fluff, it’s solid and productive. I expect that, in the not too far future, it will be hard to get a leadership position in business or government without demonstrated experience in organizing communities.

What are you most excited you about with the Art Of Community?

I’m going to doff my community organizing cap for this answer and don my editorial one. The Art Of Community is, after all is said and done, a book, and what excites me is the book as such. I love opening each chapter to see the unique way Jono presents his personal experience, in a very personal style. He brings his whole life into the book. We’re also working very hard to structure this woolly bunch of insights and principles into a fast-flowing and highly readable narrative.

I just wanted to give you folks an update on a change in the team. Isabel Kunkle who has contributed some incredible edits to Chapters 1-3 is moving onto other things. I am pleased to welcome Simon St. Laurent from O’Reilly as her replacement.

Simon St. Laurent is a computer book author and editor living in Dryden, NY. His books include Learning Rails, XML: A Primer, Cookies, and Office 2003 XML. He spent the last four years chairing the Dryden Democratic Committee, and has retired from that to focus on his wife, baby, ducks, chickens, rabbits, bees, dogs, and sometimes work. You can find his writing on everything from technology to Quakerism to life in Dryden to gardening to New York State politics aggregated at www.simonstl.com.

Friends, do welcome Simon to the team!

I am excited to announce another member of the team who is proof-reading the content that I am churning out in his general direction. His keen eye and expansive knowledge of Open Source is a positive influence on the book. Of course, it is Ryan Paul.

Ryan is the editor of Ars Technica‘s open source software articles. He has used Linux for over a decade and contributes code and documentation to several open source software projects. Ryan began his career as a tech journalist when he wrote his first magazine article at the age of 17. His articles have been featured by numerous publications, including NewsForge, Linux.com, IT Managers Journal, Linux Pro Magazine, Tux Magazine, Linux Journal, and many others. He joined Ars Technica in 2005 and has authored over 1000 articles for the popular web site. Ryan is also the creator and lead developer of Gwibber, an open source microblogging client for the GNOME desktop environment. He lives in California with his pet, a programmable robotic penguin. When he is not creating open source software or writing articles about technology, Ryan spends his time stockpiling ammunition in preparation for the inevitable Roomba insurrection. Ryan likes science fiction novels, humorously captioned felines, anime, and surreal art.

Behind the scenes, a number of people are helping make the Art Of Community as great a read as possible. This includes the editors, the O’Reilly marketing staff, people contributing thoughts and stories and more. One important group of people in this process are the proof readers. This is a set of people who I have asked to offer their thoughts and views on the content as it is written. They are there to not only ensure the content is as easy to understand as possible, but to ensure the material covers all the bases that they expect. They are each helping to make the Art Of Community great book. Over the coming weeks I want to share with you all some of these folks. You should go and high0five them, folks.

One of them is Stuart Langridge. Stuart is a well respect Javascript expert, information architect and web developer who works for Canonical Ltd. He is the author of a few books himself and is a regular contributor to Open Source projects. He is based in the West Midlands in England.

Stuart has more than a passing responsibility for proofing the book. As my best friend and fellow presenter in LugRadio, he has been demanding I write a book about community management for years. Many an evening was spent in my house, drinking tea and discussing many of the concepts in the book. Stuart helped me to run ideas and thoughts past him for input. He has been valuable part of my development as a community manager, and is the subject of a few stories in the book. His contributions have been excellent.