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 24 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

Fairly basic - 2010-01-28
Reviewer Rating:
Might be a good starting point for the complete novice, but as a community manager I found very little new info.
Writing was heavy on advice, light on examples. Lots of places where he gives you an over view of a topic and then tells you to go find a good book on the subject.

A good book with a misleading title - 2010-01-18
Reviewer Rating:
Jono Bacon's book makes a very interesting reading despite the misleading title.
I manage a few online communities and I was interested in learning from an experienced professional (Jono) how to improve my communities and my management style. The title of the book, as well many of the reviews I read were very positive. Only after reading a few dozen pages I recognized that this was not the book I was expecting. "The Art of community" is not about all online communities, it's only about online communities for open-source software. Great topic if your community is about developing some piece of software in an open-source context, but not very useful if your community is a group of people sharing a common interest but not working together toward a common goal. Jono tries to generalize his experience for a wider audience presenting a few non-open-source cases and examples.
But it's evident he has neither experience to support such generalization nor a real interest in adventuring outside the familiar open-source territory. If your community is an open-source community, get the book and religiously read every single word of it. If your community is about cars, movies, commercial software, or something else save your time and your money.

Disapointing - 2009-11-24
Reviewer Rating:
I found "The Art of Community" to be rather lacking in factual information, which is not to say that it wasn't but merely that it didn't provide much in the way of supporting information. There were many anecdotal references to the Author's experiences, which though interesting were not sufficiently helpful or informative to the extent where I would feel comfortable making a business decision based on the contents of this book. Perhaps, my judgment on this is a bit harsh; however, I think O'Reilly who caters to the web development community with a wide variety of informative books, which I've used on many occasions could have done a better job here. I think there is a dearth of knowledge generally as to the specifics of the ramifications of web 2.0 aside from the anecdotal; however for now I think I'll stick to peer-reviewed psychology and marketing rags until a proper amalgamation and concentration of peer-reviewed non-technical web 2.0 information is available. I should add that I bought this book strictly speaking as a web 2.0/social media book, so please ignore some of the harshness if you are not a web 2.0/social media application designer or programmer, because that's where my review was aimed.

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".

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Business
E-Commerce
Human-Computer Interaction
Internet/Online
Networking

Sub-Categories:
Business > Marketing
E-Commerce > Marketing and Strategy
Human-Computer Interaction > Online Communities
Internet/Online > Community Place
Networking > Video