The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation

Front Cover
"O'Reilly Media, Inc.", Aug 17, 2009 - Computers - 394 pages

Online communities offer a wide range of opportunities today, whether you're supporting a cause, marketing a product or service, or developing open source software. The Art of Community will help you develop the broad range of talents you need to recruit members to your community, motivate and manage them, and help them become active participants.

Author Jono Bacon offers a collection of experiences and observations from his decade-long involvement in building and managing communities, including his current position as manager for Ubuntu, arguably the largest community in open source software. You'll discover how a vibrant community can provide you with a reliable support network, a valuable source of new ideas, and a powerful marketing force.

The Art of Community will help you:

  • Develop a strategy, with specific objectives and goals, for building your community
  • Build simple, non-bureaucratic processes to help your community perform tasks, work together, and share successes
  • Provide tools and infrastructure that let contributors work quickly
  • Create buzz around your community to get more people involved
  • Track the community's work so it can be optimized and simplified
  • Explore a capable, representative governance strategy for your community
  • Identify and manage conflict, including dealing with divisive personalities
 

Contents

Chapter 1 The Art of Community
1
Chapter 2 Planning Your Community
21
Chapter 3 Communicating Clearly
65
Simple Is Sustainable
91
Chapter 5 Supporting Workflow with Tools
119
Chapter 6 Building Buzz
145
Chapter 7 Measuring Community
187
Chapter 8 Governance
211
Chapter 9 Handling Conflict
267
Chapter 10 Creating and Running Events
301
Chapter 11 Hiring a Community Manager
341
Index
359
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