About

Jono Bacon works at Canonical as the Ubuntu Community Manager, and helps lead the worldwide community of contributors who work on the Ubuntu family of distributions.

He started his work back in 1998, building one of the UK’s first Linux websites, Linux UK, and created a large team of contributors who produced and maintained the site. While at University, Bacon went on to join the KDE project, founded the KDE Usability Study, KDE::Enterprise, wrote some KDE applications and became the UK contact for the project. After he graduated from the University Of Wolverhampton with a Ba(Hon) in Interactive Multimedia Communication, he went on to be a full-time journalist, writing over 400 articles for over 12 magazines and online publishing houses. He also wrote three books – Linux Desktop Hacks (O’Reilly), The Official Ubuntu Book (Prentice Hall) and Practical PHP and MySQL (Prentice Hall).

Bacon also started his public speaking career around this time, and has gone on to take his unique and amusing presentations around the world and develop a reputation as an intriguing and entertaining public speaker. He has keynoted the SoCal Linux Expo (LA), Ohio LinuxFest (Ohio), GUADEC (Birmingham) and had spoken at linux.conf.au (Sydney), KDE 10th Anniversary (Germany), LinuxTag (Berlin), Bacon was also involved in the Linux User awards in London as a judge for three consecutive years.

Bacon was then approached to work at OpenAdvantage, a UK government funded organisation set up to spread Open Source in a vendor-neutral way. He worked there as a professional Open Source Advocate and Community Builder, working with hundreds of companies, individuals and organisations to explain and help them move to Open Source software.

Around this time he co-founded LugRadio, an award-winning leading Open Source podcast, mixing topical content, interviews and Open Source discussion with a strong humorous foundation. Over the course of LugRadio it netted a cult following of over 15,000 listeners and over 2million downloads. As part of his work, Bacon collected the Linux Awards 2006 Best Marketing Award on behalf of LugRadio. LugRadio was also awarded the Top Award in Linux Format magazine in a podcast round-up.

LugRadio also spawned a leading event (described as a mix of a rock concert and computer conference) named LugRadio Live, which brings over 40 speakers from around the world, as well as a live recording of the show in front of an audience. LugRadio Live has been run in the UK since 2005 and also had an event in San Francisco, sponsored by Google. Bacon is a primary organiser, and speaker and sponsor liaison.

Bacon’s career then took him to Canonical to lead the community team, and he works with the worldwide Ubuntu community to refine, improve, innovate and inspire the community. As part of the role, he works closely with the Ubuntu development team and upstreams, works on governance, scalability, processes, infrastructure and liaises with the business and management teams about community issues. He also travels extensively to meet community teams and speak at events, and helps to define where the community moves forward and grows.

In addition to this Bacon founded the Jokosher project to produce an Open Source multi-tracker application: designing an entirely new interface around audio recording.

Bacon is also extensively involved in music. He had a home studio where he records solo acoustic music as well as solo rock and metal. He has played in a number of bands, including Conspiracy and Seraphidian. In 2007 Seraphidian were rated as one of the Top 10 metal acts in the UK. The band also hit the semi-finals in the Midlands New Talent competition, but had to pull out due to a tour.

In 2008 Bacon then founded his Severed Fifth project. Severed Fifth is a music project designed to explore how far a musician can take his music with the new economics of the music industry. In it he recorded a full-solo metal album (he wrote, recorded all the instruments and vocals, produced and released the album himself). The album was released under a free Creative Commons license and to positive critical review.

In 2009 Bacon released the critically acclaimed Art Of Community by O’Reilly; a handbook for building and motivating communities. In The Art of Community reader’s experience the broad range of talents required to recruit members, motivate them, manage them, and make them happy to be part of your community. Bacon takes you through the different stages of community and covers the information you’ll need, ranging from software tools to conflict resolution skills. The book went on to be rated the #2 must-read social networking book by Mashable and one of the Top 5 must read IT hot topics by ComputerWorld.

Bacon then went on to create the Community Leadership Summit in 2009 and 2010; an event design to bring together community managers and leaders. The first incarnation of the event was hugely successful with over 250 attendees. The event continues on an annual basis.

Bacon lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Erica.

www.jonobacon.org