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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 21 Ratings

First hand experience on communitites - 2009-11-11
Reviewer Rating:
Books on this topic have been very scarce, at least until two years ago. Even today, *good* books on online communities are hard to find, this is one of the few. Other reviewers already praised the book, so I feel no need to explain why I am giving it five stars. I just would like to advice that quite a good amount of the book covers communities focused on developing FOSS software, this means that, depending on your goals/scenarios, part of the book may be irrelevant/redundant for you

A fine pick for any computer or social issues collection - 2009-11-11
Reviewer Rating:
Of relevance for anyone interested in how computers can be utilized to build virtual communities, THE ART OF COMMUNITY is especially recommended for its wider interest to any library strong in social issues. Its analysis of experiences and observations from online web communities tells how to build objectives and goals for such a web-based community, offering tools for construction and showing how to track the community's work and provide a representative governance strategy for the community. A fine pick for any computer or social issues collection.

A practical guide to community building, and a brave experiment - 2009-10-03
Reviewer Rating:
Solidly grounded in theories of social capital formation, this book offers practical advice on how to build communities, on earth as well as online. You can almost just copy and paste the ideas, checklists, todo lists and best practices tips, then apply them to your community-building effort. I've been a community organizer for more than 20 years, but I learned something new in each chapter. I wish I had this book sooner, would've help me avoid mistakes, and do a bunch of things better (maybe I should have reviewed this anonymously).

Am particularly impressed at the courage it took to also offer this book as a free download, with a liberal Creative Commons license. The pdf format is what's most useful to me - I'm literally able to copy and paste, and shape whole sections of the book so they fit my organization's needs. I might not have bought the book if it was just a book. But because I love the pdf, I bought the ipod version (which I'll probably never use, since all I can do with it is read and, okay, click on links, but I felt obliged to pay something). Hats off to O'Reilly.

much more "stories", please - 2009-11-19
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a good reference of topics on managing community.
This is well-diciplined, objective, practical, and providing good starting points.
However, I think it's too much objective and symmetrically-well-formatted, and therefore, repetitional.
As a technical doc or manual, it's good enough, but as a book, it might be just a little boring to read.
This is a good handbook, and I'm not disappointed about this book, but I honestly feel no excited.
And I had expected for much more "stories".

the art of community - 2009-10-03
Reviewer Rating:
Really loved this book. Although focused on open source software, the art of community is interesting to a more general audience. It's easy to read, and has some great specifics about how to build a community of volunteers, what motivates people to join, how to channel that energy etc. Has lots of examples to help keep things real.

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