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Archive for May, 2009


Posted on May 8, 2009 - by jono

Art Of Community Update and Pre-Order Available

As some of you will know, I have been writing a book in recent months called The Art Of Community to be published by O’Reilly. The book covers a wide range of topics around building communities including the social science behind community, planning your community growth, communicating clearly, building effective processes, setting up infrastructure, governance, conflict resolution, organising events, how to hire a community manager and more.

Well, its been a while since I provided an update on the project, so here are some nuggets of goodness you.

I started writing the book back in November and I am now nearly complete. Right now I am knee deep in edits and I have merged in all the changes from my editors Andy Oram and Simon St. Laurent. We are also currently in the reviewers phase where The Art Of Community is gently slid under the noses of a diverse set of readers where they can offer comments on grammatical issues, typos, which content works well and not-so-well and other feedback. This merry band of heroes includes Amber Graner, Stephen Walli and Stuart Langridge. Their comments and attention to detail has been superb, and I want to say a huge thankyou for their efforts. I am looking forward to wrapping these final changes before I head off to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona soon.

I am also pleased to announce that the book is now available for pre-order. Before we finalised the book specs to go out to the retailers, O’Reilly and I had a conversation about the pricing. Originally the book was going to be priced at $39.99 but I felt the price could make the book less accessible to communities with limited funds available who wanted a printed copy. O’Reilly agreed and I am pleased that the book is now available for the more affordable recommended retail price of $29.99. Also, don’t forget that the book will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike Non-Commercial license too. This means that anyone download and read it, but the print edition complete with the expected O’Reilly quality in materials, print and binding will be affordable too. O’Reilly have been stunning over the coarse of these discussions; thanks folks!

So, where can you pre-order it from? Ultimately most good book shops will carry the book but I know that each of the Amazon sites now provides the ablity to pre-order. So, head over to one of the following sites, lay down some wonga and pre-order a solid chunk of community building expertise distilled into an eye-ball friendly fun-fest:

Buying a copy of the book will show your support for the project and send a great message to O’Reilly about (a) publishing books about community and (b) publishing books under a CC license. It will also provide you with chunk of text that requires no batteries, no Kindle, and can be scribbled on with a pencil for easy note-taking! Sounds like a good deal to me. :-)

In addition to this, if you do pre-order it do show off your support for the Art Of Community project and put the following button on your website/blog:

Available in these sizes:

So, there we go. But before I wrap up, I am also looking for some feedback regarding the www.artofcommunityonline.org website and how I can continue to build out its facilities for the needs of readers and those enthuses at building community. Do come along and join in the discussion! :)