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The Art Of Community is a new book being written by Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager, which will be published by O'Reilly in 2009. The book will be available for purchase in print and will also be released online under a Creative Commons license. Read more about the book here. This website provides news, updates and sneak peeks of the book as it is developed. Stay tuned! |
Sent by the always wonderous Mike Basinger: The Art of Community is now available on the Kindle. Kindle fans, go and buy it and don’t forget to review the book!
Reader Comments (2) · Leave a commentBy Andy Oram
My writing colleague Anne Gentle wrote a book called Conversation and Community about how writers on projects could improve documentation and customer experiences by interacting with customers online as part of the work of developing learning materials. Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation was published on August 3, 2009. I was asked to write a foreword, which I’m reprinting here as it appeared in the book.
A few years ago this book could not have been written, because the phenomena it describes were just poking their heads out of the sea, and no one could predict what form their evolution would take. A few years from now this book will be unnecessary, because we’ll all be participating so fully in the phenomena that newcomers will take to them like ducks to water. You are fortunate to have this book at this moment, for you can lead the next generation of information providers into the era of expert/amateur interaction.
Anne Gentle purports in this book to give you the tools and insights to create growth-oriented educational experiences for your clients in this age of collaborative learning. To bring home the goods, Anne has combined hard-won insights from every angle: academic research, reports from the field by other cutting-edge practitioners, years of experience in corporate technical writing departments, and personal practice as a contributor and organizer in some of the most sophisticated of open-source, community-oriented authoring sites.
I’ve exchanged mail with Anne and worked with her on FLOSS Manuals, an experiment in free documentation that takes center stage in many of the examples in this book. Having toured some of the same ground as Anne, having enjoyed some of the same views from the commanding heights, and having been caught in some of the same downpours, I can attest that she has the landscape right.
FLOSS Manuals is just one of the many projects on the Internet that show the power of people working together to educate the public with documents open to all for editing and distribution. Among the lessons these projects offer is the tremendous energy that arises from public engagement. But they also show that this energy is more potent when managed well.
Because client education, as a key element of client satisfaction, is the concern of anyone working on a project with outside stakeholders, this book should claim a wide audience. The main targets of the book are technical writers at companies experimenting with social media (also known as Web 2.0). But among the barriers to collaboration sliced away by Anne’s scalpel is the distinction between official technical documentation, marketing-oriented white papers, release notes, customer service forums, and even customer comments in the field. If you work in technical development, marketing, customer support, or that most intriguing new job description—community manager—this book has news for you.
Every source of information with which we’re familiar—journalism, education, government, and certainly technical documentation—is abandoning the oracular view of information. In simpler days, those of us in documentation and publishing found experts and simply proclaimed their insights to the masses. Now we realize that many of those insights originated among the masses in the first place. Furthermore, writers and publishers find that their work doesn’t get read unless the expert conducts a dialog with the audience.
We may know what they need to know, but only they can tell us what they need to know.
I’m hoping that the context for the previous, artfully crafted sentence ensured it had the proper impact, but in case your reader response didn’t work as I had hoped, let me spell it out. Experts possess knowledge that other people wish to mine, and often will pay for. But the experts often can’t anticipate the questions that non-experts will have. The experts are shocked to discover the areas where non-experts experience difficulties. Once they understand their audience better, most experts radically alter the topics they discuss and how they present them. Thus the importance of conversation and collaboration between experts and non-experts.
Many of us worry about our future in an environment of blogs, wikis, and stakeholder forums, where anyone who knows anything can share it. The question “How can I earn a living?” must be approached in Through the Looking Glass fashion, by walking away. Join the online conversation. If there’s a place for you as a professional, you’ll find it there.
Occasionally I talk to someone who believes that self-help and self-organization are taking the whole pie, and that the best sugarplums will pop up on their own. If that were true, the world wouldn’t need professional editors and information architects, and it wouldn’t need Anne’s book. But these misguided futurists have it profoundly wrong. Experts and non-experts need to work together.
I finally got provoked when one programmer boasted to me that he never read any documentation. He looked at the source code of the software he was planning to use as a start. He would write code till he hit a barrier, then ask a question online, then go back and write code till he hit another barrier, and so on.
I responded to him, “You would never design a software system using such an undisciplined and ad hoc methodology. Why do you tolerate your learning experience to be designed in that manner?”
The programmer didn’t appreciate that each person must bring some expertise to benefit from experimentation and collaborative learning. Modern technical training, with its heavy emphasis on both experimentation and collaboration, draws heavily on John Dewey’s classic theories of learning as a dialectical process between the learner and her environment—the more prepared the learner is, the greater heights she can attain.
You probably remember rejecting a book as boring and irrelevant, only to come back and embrace it later after a phase of personal growth. Collaborative forums can foster this upward spiral. The techniques in this book help you not only improve the forums, and use them to improve your documentation, but also use the forums to prepare readers to benefit from the documentation.
So, what can you offer as a writer or other professional to foster this upward spiral and give readers the best available educational experience?
Most readers stick to familiar ways of communicating. The hoary old mailing list format, and even newer documentation models such as wikis, fail to exploit the power of user contributions. It takes work to create a system that efficiently accepts, formats, and disseminates information provided by public participants. And those are just the start. Popularity ratings, tagging mechanisms, and sophisticated search options can dramatically increase documentation’s usefulness as well. Take the lead to develop and train your community to use a powerful interactive educational system, and their productivity will soar. You’ll probably generate more interest in your professional contributions along the way.
Everybody can use an editor. Routine proofreading for grammar and consistency aren’t usually important for casual online contributions, but anything longer than a couple of paragraphs could benefit from a look at its purpose, structure, and information gaps. A small investment of professional time can make the document much more useful. Remember that you are a collaborator, so you need to work dialectically with the author to find the best approach to the document. And you’ll both learn something from the process.
A big part of writing is going back to straighten out a document. Because online documents tend toward drastic fragmentation, and reflect many different voices, the role of a professional writer and editor faces a steeper challenge but a concomitantly larger benefit to the overall site. You can spend time organizing documents and creating pathways through them, creating links, and putting up portal pages. Don’t feel shy about intervening directly in the documents themselves, by adding introductions and transitions and changing headings to indicate more accurately what’s inside the document.
Most people have something to contribute, but they wait to be asked. Once asked, they’re more than happy to help out. You need to determine where the needs are and who can fulfill them. You also need to offer support for them to create a document of high quality and promote the result so they feel their work is rewarded by exposure.
Your own documentation should be the flagship for the community. You can use community input to improve it and add some research of your own to take it to the next higher level of community trust.
Reading Anne’s book brought me a number of satisfying moments. She quite properly recognizes the importance of both documentation and search: the notion that both availability and findability are fundamental documentation requirements. I’m glad she attacked the stance that we serve our project best by always presenting it in a positive light. She understands the role of audio and video media in the current educational landscape. And she even draws insight from one of my favorite and chronically under-appreciated research projects, John Carroll’s Minimalist documentation.
The book is not as tightly organized or carefully paced as an ideal expository text would be. This is because Anne offers so much, has so few sources to point to when making her core points, and is covering fast-changing areas whose participants offer new insights literally every week. She manages to pull it all together.
I think the author of a foreword is expected to say he “couldn’t put the book down ’til it was done.” I’m afraid I can’t offer Anne the opportunity to make that boast. In fact, I was constantly pulled away from her book by her references to fascinating documents that added extra fodder to her argument or provided new perspectives. I’m sure Anne’s web site will host equally enticing content. Let this book be an anchor for your exploration of collaborative document production, so that your own documents can be anchors within your clients’ learning ecosystem.
Reader Comments (4) · Leave a comment
A printed copy of The Art of Community spotted at O’Reilly in Cambridge, Mass!
Reader Comments (4) · Leave a commentAnother rather nice quote to share, this time from Danese Cooper:
“Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community is a wonderful meditation on building communities using modern infrastructure tools and practices gleaned from the Free and Open Source Software movement. Jono’s examples, taken from his work on Ubuntu, give a good picture of a working community and how it functions. The fact that the book is backed by a conference and an online community means this fine effort will potentially continue to grow into the watering hole for community gardeners, leaders and managers”.
— Danese Cooper, Open Source Diva and OSI Director
This quote, like the others, is available on the reviews page.
Reader Comments (0) · Leave a commentThree more reviews of the book, added to the reviews page:
“Jono Bacon has long been an insightful voice for open source community. Now his artful stories, distilling the ethos of organizing people and activities on the net, at conferences, and in our daily routines, provide a framework for successful, community building strategies”.
— Pete Kronowitt, Linux and Open Source Strategist, Intel
“To a soundtrack of heavy metal, free-software geekstar Jono Bacon recounts the story of how he learned to gently yet productively manhandle groups of unruly Internet folks gathered around a common topic or cause. His process and methods are set out in his book, ‘The Art of Community’, where Jono’s non-ego driven account of community building will aid all manner of bosses, since almost every subject matter these days has a community with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and even (as in the case of World of Warcraft) millions of people clamoring around it. (Even David Hasselhoff!) Be forewarned, capitalist! There is no chapter called ‘How to Turn Communities into Dollars,’ but following Jono’s suggestions may yield you what every leader (even a capitalist) wants — a loyal and passionate community willing to collaborate to achieve a common goal”.
— Irina Slutsky, geekentertainment.tv
“If you listen to open source fans, you might get the idea that “the community” is elves who come out of the woodwork to fix your broken software while you sleep. In ‘The Art of Community’, Jono Bacon explains how reality is a little more complicated, and what the community needs in return. This book will help you get started with the diverse skills required to keep a collaborative community on track, including copywriting, social software selection, conflict resolution, and measuring if it’s all working”.
— Don Marti, Conference Chair, OpenSource World and Organizer, Windows Refund Day, Burn All GIFs Day, Free Dmitry, and FreedomHEC.
Thanks, Pete, Irina and Don!
Reader Comments (2) · Leave a commentTwo more reviews of The Art Of Community. First from Mark Hinkle:
“Communities are very complex ecosystems of human beings. Cultivating, growing, shaping and guiding the community to make them productive is definitely as much (or even more) art as science. In ‘The Art of Community’ Bacon does an excellent job explaining in detail the considerations for managing and cultivating a healthy open source community. He provides a blueprint for developing and maintaining an open source community in a programmatic way and his attention to detail and understanding of the dynamics of communities make this book an invaluable resource for anyone looking to build and maintain a community. Drawing from his own extensive experience, Bacon does a great job of explaining how to help foster a community and provides great advice ranging from choosing infrastructure, measuring growth and even hiring a community manager. All and all a must-read for any community manager”.
— Mark R. Hinkle, Vice President of Community, Zenoss Inc.
Secondly, from Seif Lotfy:
“As a rock solid book “The Art of Community” is not only about communities, but also management, organization and even marketing – it is the bible for community leadership. This book should have been out a long time ago and reading through the chapters made me reflect on almost every important situation I had to face with teams, from conflicts all the way to handling buzz. It would have helped solve some of the issues I was stuck in much faster then I did (although all the issues solved in the end were exactly how Jono described it). I am eager to apply more of this wisdom on the current projects I am involved in”.
— Seif Lotfy, GNOME Foundation, Zeitgeist Co-Founder and Team Leader
Thanks, Mark and Seif!
Reader Comments (1) · Leave a commentI am tickled pink to add this new review to the reviews page:
“One thing that’s impressed me about Jono Bacon, something one can notice back when he and others were building a community around their pioneering Linux podcast, is that he simply gets the concept of community. It comes out in most everything he says, and most every decision he makes. This is the kind of a person you want writing a book on the topic. Open-source community building cannot be boiled down to a formula. It’s a constant effort, a soft science, an art, and Bacon is an ideal art teacher”.
— Dan Goldstein, Professor of Marketing, London Business School and Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research
Wow, thanks, Dan!
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Folks, I am proud to announce the release of what is likely to be the final version of the first chapter of The Art Of Community.
In this chapter I lay the foundations of the book, talk through some of the underlying elements around collaboration, belonging, opportunities, the driving forces in community, and set the tone for the rest of the book. While this is only 26 pages out of 350+ in the book, and is more introductory than hands-on, it should give you a decent idea of the lay of the land.
Go and download Chapter 1 here, let me know your thoughts and do tweet / dent / blog / talk / squawk about it. For those of you who use IRC, I will also be hanging out in #artofcommunity on Freenode. come and join us. 
Also, I am going to be looking for reviews of the chapter (you can see reviews of the wider book here) – if you would like to write a review, please either add it to this entry as a comment or mail me at jono AT jonobacon DOT org with your review. Please include your name and organization/project. Thanks!
Reader Comments (25) · Leave a comment
Hi everyone, I have some exciting news to report. Tomorrow (Thu 16th July 2009) at 5pm UTC (check your equivalent time here) I will be releasing the likely final version of Chapter 1 from the book, in full! The chapter will be available as a PDF to download and share from artofcommunityonline.org.
The chapter will still technically be a draft as there is another quality phase to go through to pick up any small errors or glitches, but what you will read tomorrow will be pretty much complete other than any of these glitches that may have slipped in.
Stay tuned folks and check back here at 5pm UTC tomorrow!
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Among other good book stores, The Art Of Community is now available to pre-order on Amazon:
