I am delighted to add to the roster another person who has contributed few stories to the Art Of Community.

This time it is Celeste Lyn Paul, a senior interaction architect at User-Centered Design, Inc. Celeste helps make software easier to use by understanding the user’s work processes and designing interactive systems to fit their needs. She is also involved in open source software and leads the KDE Usability Project, mentors for the OpenUsability Season of Usability program, and serves on the Kubuntu Council.

Celeste contributed some her stories to the Measuring Community chapter in a section that explores the value of observational tests in improving how communities can work better together. Celeste performs excellent work in trying to understand how to make computers easier, and with the running theme of simplicity cascading through the book, her thoughts offer some valuable insight to the Art Of Community.

I am delighted to announce another source of excellent stories and interview content for the book. This time it is Chris Messina who is behind Spread Firefox, BarCamp, and coworking and open web standards initiatives.

Chris arrived in San Francisco four years ago and began volunteering for the Mozilla Foundation, leading the Spread Firefox community marketing project, helping to raise over $220,000 in microdonations to put a two-page spread, which he also designed, into the New York Times helping to increase Firefox’s downloads to over 50 million in its first six months.

He went on to co-found social web browser Flock. Later, he co-founded Citizen Agency with Tara Hunt, and was named one of the Digital Utopians and People Who Populate Web 2.0 in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006 after his work on WineCamp.

I am delighted to announce a good friend who is contributing some further thoughts to the book is Leslie Hawthorn, the Program Manager for Google’s Open Source Programs Office, where she’s the Community Manager for the Google Summer of Code community. Leslie has already sent me her thoughts and I am looking forward to merging some of them into the Art Of Community.

Leslie recently conceived, launched and managed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, the world’s first global initiative to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of Open Source software development. Leslie has also organized more than 100 open source conferences and hackathons, most held at Google’s Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA. When not wrangling FOSS developers, she’s usually speaking about Open Source, FOSS in education, and community building or writing for the Google Open Source Blog. Prior to joining Google, Leslie got her feet wet in Silicon Valley high tech at a small communications semiconductor startup, where she worked in Marketing and Public Relations. She holds a Honors B.A. in English Language and Literature from U.C. Berkeley and her personal website is www.hawthornlandings.org.

I am delighted to announce that I recently received some excellent interview content from Paul Hudson, the editor of Linux Format magazine.

Paul and I go back a long way. Many moons ago I used to write for Linux Format. In fact, I cut my journalistic teeth with Linux Format and wrote a number of articles and had a regular monthly a column. My friends over at Linux Format have continually produced an excellent magazine for Linux users and enthusiasts.

Paul is a great writer and editor and has given many communities exposure in the magazines over the years. I asked Paul for some of his insight from the perspective of a magazine to help advise communities on how to get media exposure. His comments add some real value into this area.

I like Jeremy Allison. Not only do I admire his contributions to Samba and Free Software, but we also share a sense of brotherhood as cantankerous Brits in California. Jeremy has been a consistent voice in the Free Software movement and is never afraid to lay down the law.

I am delighted he is interested in contributing some of his thoughts and stories to the Art Of Community. His experience will bring yet more experiences and insight to what is shaping up to be an exciting book.

Another quick update on some more content I am gathering for the mighty tome…

Mike Linksvayer joined Creative Commons as CTO. Previously the co-founder Bitzi, he has over ten years’ experience as an enterprise software, web, and multimedia developer and consultant and holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I worked with Mike when getting together the Severed Fifth announcement, and he has been tremendously helpful in helping me to work in producing Creative Commons content. He is a great asset to the Creative Commons.

I am in the process of interviewing Mike for some content for the book, and I am excited about the insights he will bring to the Art Of Community.

Of course, in addition to a printed version of the book by O’Reilly, the Art Of Community will also be available under a Creative Commons License, so the content is particularly apt.

I am pleased to announce that another person who is contributing interview content to the book is Cristina Verduzco, the Volunteer/Outreach Manager for the East Bay SPCA organisation that provides animal welfare services. Cristina is responsible for all facets of the volunteer program, coordination and planning of multiple events, and coordination of mobile adoptions. She also supervise the Feral Fix programme and the foster program.

I actually met Christina while out shopping a week back. She had a tent set up and was performing outreach to sign up new volunteers. I shared with her my community work and before long we were comparing notes. She was a natural candidate to contribute content to the book, and I received her responses this morning. I will be merging it in today. Thanks, Cristina!:)

Over the coming weeks I am going to be posting some updates on some of the people who have contributed content to the book, and some of the examples and stories that are featured. I think this will give you folks a definitive idea of the kind of content that is coming into the book.

One of the first people I interviewed for content was Ton Roosendaal from the Blender Foundation. Ton’s story is incredible and the Blender community is a tremendous place for creativity and growth. Ton has demonstrated an unrelenting commitment to building a free suite for creating imagery and animation. This has in turn enabled a global community of people who can express their creativity without either (a) spending $2000 on software or (b) pirating the software and putting themselves at risk of prosecution. In the book I talk about the transition that Blender made when it was Open Sourced and how Ton made it happen.