Joining Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), Mike Shinoda (creator of Linkin Park), Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media), Mårten Mickos (former MySQL CEO, current Eucalyptus CEO), and Mike Linksvayer (VP of Creative Commons), I pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

This will be with Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia. Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles (over 3.82 million in English alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100,000 regularly active contributors.

Wikipedia has become one of the world’s most well-known collaborative communities, and Jimmy Wales had a primary role in the site’s success. Jimmy was also named by TIME as one of 2006′s most influencial people in the world. I look forward to sharing his insights in the second edition of The Art of Community.

Joining Linus Torvalds (Linux), Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), Mårten Mickos (MySQL/Eucalyptus), and Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons), I pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media, a diverse company with a goal to spread the knowledge of innovators. O’Reilly started doing this via the publication of books (The Art of Community is published by O’Reilly), many of which are the best known books in the technology field. O’Reilly has since diversified into conferences (e.g. OSCON, Strata, TOC, Velocity, and Where), organizing the popular FooCamp gathering of leading minds in the industry, and with their O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures firm.

Tim O’Reilly has also been seen as a thought leader on change and innovation in technology. He was a driver in the adoption of Web 2.0 and has been a proponant of social media, and particularly Twitter.

In his insightful interview for The Art of Community I talk to Tim about social media, how he discovered it, how he sees the disruptive potential of it, how it has affected his work and communities, and how he manages it in his life. I look forward to sharing Tim’s thoughts with you soon!

Joining Linus Torvalds (Linux), Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park), and Mårten Mickos (MySQL/Eucalyptus), I pleased to announce the next interview I will be featuring in the second edition of The Art of Community.

This one will be with Mike Linksvayer, who serves as Vice President of Creative Commons. Mike originally joined Creative Commons as their Chief Technical Officer in 2003 and then became Vice President in 2007. Previously he co-founded Bitzi, an early open content/open data service.

The Creative Commons has gone us to really redefine how we can share, remix, and collaborate around media, and the organization has not only defined a clear set of licenses (of which The Art of Community uses one of them), but also worked to encourage media creation, and the ubiquitous growth of Free Culture. Mike has delivered a fascinating interview that touches on how the Creative Commons was formed, how it has grown it’s global community, and the obstacles it has surpassed in challenging how the industry approaches what we can do with music, video and other media.