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), Mike Linksvayer (VP of Creative Commons), and Mark Bussler (founder of Classic Game Room), I am pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

Mary Colvig started life at Mozilla in a PR role before moving on to lead the PR team and work as a community manager for the Firefox, Spread Firefox, and other related communities. She has seen the growth of the Firefox community since it started and has provided a facinating interview for the second edition of The Art of Community that touches on how the community has scaled up, the relationship between the commercial and community entities of Mozilla, and how Mozilla has worked with the community to grow and retain their enthusiasm to bring more and more value to Firefox.

I look forward to sharing Mary’s interview with you all in the second edition of The Art of Community!

At the heart of great communities is great communication. Different communities converse in very different ways. Some step out into the big blue room and talk face to face in coffee shops, classrooms and lecture theatres, whereas some chew the fat online on mailing lists, in chat channels and in forums. Unfortunately when many communities set up shop they make one particularly common mistake: they focus too heavily on the medium as opposed to the approach.

Go and check it out here.

A while back I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 in San Jose on the 18th and 19th July 2009. Well, I think it is time for lil’ update on what is shaping up to be a rocking event.

The aim of the summit is get community managers, leaders and organizers together to discuss, debate and share ideas on building great community in a vendor-neutral environment. The event is entirely free (although I ask everyone to go and register and it takes place the weekend immediately before OSCON, in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Details of how to get there are here.

Since I announced the event, the response has been stunning and over 150 people have registered with a fantastic and diverse range of contributors signed up to attend. You can see this awesome list of attendees here.

The the aim and purpose of the event to provide an open, transparent and vendor-neutral environment for discussion, and I have been really keen to make sure this is an unconference (an event in which an empty schedule is available at the start of the event, and attendees can go and add topics). The reason for this is to ensure the sessions are as diverse as possible and not merely what I think we should discuss. The openness of the scheduling means that anyone can add a session that they think would be of interest to the other attendees.

If you are coming along and interested in running a session, feel free to discuss it on this wiki page with the other attendees: you may find some other people who would like to help with the session. Speaking of the wiki, we also have rideshare, roomshare and other pages springing up to make attending the event as easy and enjoyable as possible.

I have another update on the event half-penned, but I will send that over in the coming week. Stay tuned, and go and register! I hope to see you there!

Do remember though that the cover shown on the website is not going to be the final cover!

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.

The book covers a wide range of topics including planning a community strategy, mapping out governance, building excitement and buzz, processes, tools and infrastructure, conflict resolution and more.

The book is much more than merely a set of guidelines though. It is a patchwork of experiences, stories and anecdotes from a diverse range of communities, each illustrating the concepts in the book. You can learn more about the book by clicking here.

The Art Of Community will be published by O’Reilly and available from all good bookstores. In addition to this, the book will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license. This will enable you to download it freely, share it and build upon it.

Keeping Up To Date

artofcommunityonline.org has been launched to track the progress of the book. This site will feature a range of different types of content:

• Regular updates about progress on the book, and discussion of many of the topics discussed in the Art Of Community.
• Regularl requests for comments and opinions about different aspects of community, many of which I will feature in the book.
• Profiles of the people and communities featured in the book.
• Sneak peeks, samples and sections posted as a taster of the content to come.
• News about the book release, reviews, opinions and promotional events will be posted here first.

If you are curious about the Art Of Community this is the place to be. Rock and roll.

So how can you stay up to date? How can you easily get all of those juicy updates delivered right to you? Easy:

• Subscribe – subscribe to the blog RSS feed to have updates delivered directly to your feed reader or browser. This is the easiest way to keep up to date. Subscribe and enjoy the posts.
• Twitter – follow my Twitter account for regular updates as they happen about the writing.
• You should also check back often to join in the discussions with the community surrounding the book!

So, this is an exciting day that marks the beginning of the road to an exciting book. Stay tuned!