Art Of Community Online

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.