Archive for February 14th, 2008

Posted on February 14, 2008 - by jono

Quickies

Step back, put on the protective visor, and get ready for some quickies:

• I did an interview with Orv at SCaLE about Ubuntu, Canonical, LugRadio, SCaLE, speaking and various other things. Go and grab it here.
• Ubuntu Developer Week is kicking arse and taking names, and do continue to Digg it. It is going to be an excellent week, and I am looking forward to seeing you all online at the sessions.
• Big thanks to Ilan for taking me into Los Angeles and showing me around – after three years, I finally made it there. Hollywood is an interesting and wacky place, and I certainly want to get back there again.
• The Ubuntu California LoCo team did an excellent job at SCaLE with the Ubuntu booth. It is great to see LoCo teams in action, and it sounds like it was a great success.
• Nathan from the Ubuntu Californian LoCo team did a video interview with me while I was in the bar at the end of SCaLE. Go and see it here. I was a few beers in at this point, so be sympathetic to my ramblings.
• Right now I am in San Francisco and I fly back later today. At 1pm I head to The Metreon in San Francisco to do a tour of the venue for LugRadio Live USA 2008. Google are sponsoring the venue and loads of other stuff, and the always awesome Leslie and Cat from the Google Open Source center are helping to pull everything together. They are doing a stunning job there.
• Meryl gave me a a ‘Meanie Baby‘, which is a beanie duck with it’s head removed. This duck thing continues to plague my presence at conferences, and she is the ring-leader. She must be stopped.
• Ken VanDine needs to change his name to Ken Van Damme. He was also seperated at birth from Jorge Castro.
• WARNING: I am writing up a big blog entry about metal. Those of you who are into false-metal will not be my friend.

More soon.

Posted on February 14, 2008 - by jono

Be Excellent To Each Other

When looking at communities and trying to de-construct and understand how they work, we can often approach it from an overtly task-based approach – identifying methods in which communities are successful at doing stuff. Of course, effective, measurable outcomes are important in community, but it is also critical to sometimes help your community step back and identify some of the things we often take for granted, one such thing being friendships.

Everyone, and by that I mean everyone, including you, dear reader, needs to feel respected and socially connected with fellow community members – if this most basic need is met, effective community can give you a sense of belonging that is difficult to replace. Communities that get this right experience incredible commitment from their members, and their members engage at not only a collaborative level, but a social level too. Retention, be it staff or volunteer, is critical to the success of any collaborative group, and you can translate this into foster a culture of people being decent to each other, which invariably results in friendships, and they will be happy and stick around. Of course, this culture will not paper over the cracks of bad processes, resource issues, bottlenecks and other unsavoury problems, but good community is about multiple strands coming together to form a solid, consistent picture.

It can often be tempting to let the pieces of the jigsaw overshadow the bigger picture, don’t let it happen to your community.