randomosity

In The Art of Com­munity, Jono Bacon tackles the task of explain­ing how to attract, build and main­tain pro­duct­ive col­lab­or­at­ive online com­munit­ies. Bacon has had impress­ive cre­den­tials to author such a book and draws from his exper­i­ence skill­fully. With over ten years exper­i­ence in the open source com­munity he has the hands-on exper­i­ence with ini­ti­at­ives such as com­munity man­ager for Ubuntu, KDE and OpenAdvantage.

The book is organ­ised logic­ally with a healthy selec­tion of applied chapters in design­ing a strategy, under­stand­ing the soci­olo­gical aspects behind com­munity form­a­tion, through under­stand­ing com­munity health and deal­ing with issues that arise. Bacon freely admits that this is an abso­lutely fluid non-science in con­stant evol­u­tion and stays well to the prin­ciples couched in his own experience.

I like the lyr­ical style of the book. Bacon keeps the prose sur­pris­ingly light for the nature of the topic (i.e. he could eas­ily fall to using too much jar­gon to impact a sci­entific palour — he effect­ively avoids this). I like his con­stant inter­jec­tions from per­sonal exper­i­ence and informal lan­guage. Sec­tions are kept shorter and read­able and he has made an attempt to dis­till learn­ing into a series of spe­cific and focus points. Addi­tion­ally he car­ries a use­ful thread through his nar­rat­ive remind­ing the reader at reg­u­lar instances of what has been covered and where we should be at in the pro­cess of under­stand­ing. Not­with­stand­ing this he does not attempt to imply that there is a tried and proven pro­cess that will lead to suc­cess, instead sug­gest­ing that he is shar­ing one path of many. The defin­i­tion of this path is well illus­trated and logic­ally delin­eated. The basis is provided for each and thus allow for indi­vidual adjust­ment or judge­ment of whether it is applicable.

This book effect­ively com­bines the philo­soph­ical with the tech­nical spe­cif­ics. Although gen­er­ally aimed at the stra­tegic level in the chapter on ‘Sup­port­ing Work­flow with Tools’ for example, Bacon provides con­struct­ive and use­ful real world examples of hands-on use with spe­cific tools, and con­sist­ently ties these to the lar­ger prin­ciples of change man­age­ment pro­cess in light of the wider prin­ciples of assess­ment and response.

This a use­ful book not just for those dir­ectly charged with the the emer­ging task of com­munity man­ager, but also those that have the vis­ion to real­ise the import­ance of main­tain­ing com­munity whether they are on the fin­an­cial or mar­ket­ing side of the organisation.

I would fur­ther recom­mend this book as a less detailed read for those hop­ing to quickly grasp the import­ance of the task and the evol­u­tion of the mar­ket­place in the era of Enter­prise 2.0.

Also…check out the com­pan­ion web­site to the book.