I am delighted to share that Chris Anderson will be providing the foreword for the book. Chris is the current editor of Wired magazine, winning the National Magazine Award for general excellence three times as part of his tenure. He is also the author of the New York Times best-seller The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Chris also wrote Free: The Future of a Radical Price and has also been part of The Economist, Nature, and Science. Outside of writing he is actively involved in DIYDrones.

For you Ubuntu fans reading this, Chris is a fan of Ubuntu and interested in the work we are doing to bring Free Software to the masses. I think Chris will bring a strong sense of credibility to the art and science of community management outlined in the book.

You can keep up to date about the book on the website and by following @artofcommunity.

As part of the agreement with O’Reilly, I was keen for the book to be released in both print form and under a free Creative Commons license, and O’Reilly happily agreed (they have been releasing many of their books for free for many years). I believe that community management and best practice should be available to all, and not just those with a wallet full of notes, and I can’t think of a better publisher to support this ethos.

If trying to write a great book about your profession was not worrying enough, the really worrying period came next. Would people like it, and would it help them build communities? I wanted to ensure everyone who believed in the book were satisfied when it finally came out.

I worried myself senseless.

This guy got it and likes to read it in front of webcams,

Fortunately, the reception was really quite positive. It was rated #2 in the Top 10 must-have social media books by Mashable, received favourable reviews in the press, and has netted 4 1/2 stars on Amazon USA and Amazon UK, and 4 stars on Amazon Canada. It started being referred to as the leading book on community management and spawned translated editions in Japanese and other languages.

Naturally I was stoked with the reception. Fortunately, the book has sold decently, showing O’Reilly that the Creative Commons approach is good for business, and also that people will indeed buy print copies of media they could get for free. Thankyou to everyone who bought or download the book, and thankyou for your support.

The Second Edition

I few weeks ago I tweeted:

Getting the itch to write a 2nd edition of The Art of Community – would you folks be interested in it? #artofcommunity #oreilly #community

After an eager response I contacted the always awesome Andy Oram from O’Reilly (who was responsible for the first edition happening), and he was interested. I fleshed out some plans, put together a proposal and sent it over. Last week it got approved and this week we finalized the contract.

So, I am delighted to announce that I have started work on a second edition of The Art of Community. I can’t confirm a publishing date yet, but stay tuned.

Keeping Up To Date

Speaking of staying tuned, like with the first edition, I will be blogging throughout the writing process and providing plenty of updates, news, competitions, and features as it continues. You can keep up to date on the official blog, by following the brand new @artofcommunity on Twitter, and on the Facebook page.

• Firstly, The Art Of Community was rated #2 in Top 10 must-have books on social media by Mashable. Wow, I am tickled pink about this. Thanks, Mashable folks!
• Secondly, I have have heard from a bunch of people that the legendary .net Magazine reviewed The Art Of Community saying it was well written, well structured and intriguing that O’Reilly support it as a free e-book too. Rock and roll.

If you lovely people spot any more reviews, do let me know.

• Communitizing the community with community tools -thanks to my friends over at ZDNet for publishing this for me. This is an overview of some tools I find awesome for building great communities.
• Interview with Datamation on The Art of Community – Bruce Byfield interviewed me about The Art Of Community and what I would like to see in an up-and-coming second edition.

You can see it on this page and you can check out the Art of Community Amazon page here. Go and buy a copy and support the project, folks!

Today I also did a webinar about the book and you see it here. Thanks to Intro Networks for the opportunity!

You can join us here.

Can’t see the vid? Click here

Awesome work, Davey and Hull LUG! I was chuckling all the way through it, and yes, this absolutely counts in the competition!

Think you can do better than Davey’s rocking effort? Well, proove it, and get involved!

Since I released The Art of Community, one thing has become evident: the people who are buying it are awesome. If you have bought it you are awesome. If you have not, you too can be awesome.

This got my mind thinking. We should put a face to the names of these awesome people. Credit where credit is due to those of you who are supporting a Creative Commons licensed book about building collaborative communities.

So, I have a fun little competition meme. It works like this:

1. Holding your copy of The Art of Community, have a picture taken of yourself with it. Really go for gold in the picture: extra points are awarded for outfits, hats, exciting locations and comedy faces.
2. Upload your photo to Flickr (or other fave photo sharing site) with the tag artofcommunity and if you use Twitter/identi.ca, use the #artofcommunity hashtag.

I will look over all the photos and pick a winner. The winner of the competition will get a special prize. The deadline for the competition is October 25th.

Should be a little fun.

When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales.

But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them. To make this happen O’Reilly needed to be on board to allow the book to be freely copied and shared, in an era in which these very freedoms threaten the publishing world.

But they came through. Thanks to the incredible support of Andy Oram, my founding editor for the book, O’Reilly were hugely supportive of the project and our desire to break down these barriers.

Today I am pleased to announce the general availability of The Art Of Community under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

With this license that the book is under you have the following freedoms with the entire content:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work

…with a few requirements:

• Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

While the book is ready to download right now, the book is available to buy in print, on Kindle, and other electronic book formats and I would like to encourage you to buy a printed copy of the book for a few reasons:

• Firstly, buying a copy sends a tremendous message to O’Reilly that they should continue to publish books (a) about community and (b) under a Creative Commons license.
• Secondly, it will encourage O’Reilly to invest in a second edition of the book down the line, which will in turn mean that communities around the world will have a refreshed and updated edition that is available to them.
• Thirdly, aside from the voting-with-your-feet side of things, it is just a really nice book to own in print. It is really well made, looks stunning and feels great to curl up with in a coffee shop or on the couch.

The book is available to buy on all the major Amazon sites:

• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Japan
• United States
• United Kingdom

Even if you don’t buy it, I would be hugely grateful that if you like it, please go and review it on Amazon. This is a hugely contribution. Thanks!

You can download the The Art of Community here.

Recently I announced my brand spanking new book The Art of Community and so far the reception has been fantastic! Thanks to everyone who has been spreading the news about the book – continue to do your good thang!

Well, I am a firm believer that you should look after your own family, and I am a member of the awesome Ubuntu family, so I have managed to swing a sweet deal with O’Reilly, the publishers of the book, to send all approved USA based teams a free printed copy of the book and all other approved teams a free electronic copy of the book. While we wish we could send all approved teams across the world a free printed copy, O’Reilly are only able to cater to USA based teams right now. Damn economy.

To keep this as simple as possible, you can request your book by following these steps:

1. The team contact shown on our LoCo Team List (and only the team contact) should send me an email to jono AT ubuntu DOT com with the subject line Free Art of Community Book For LoCo Team (be sure to type this subject line exactly as here or it may slip through the net). In your email include all the following details:
   • Your full name.
   • Which team you are from.
   • Your full address (including zip/postal code, region and country).
   • Your phone number, including country and area code.
2. I will assess whether you will receive a print or electronic edition.
3. A few weeks after the deadline you should receive your edition of The Art of Community, for free!

A few notes:

• Only approved teams are eligible for the free copies of the book.
• Only the team contact for each team (shown on this page) can make the request for the book.
• There is a limit of one copy of each book per approved team.
• O’Reilly will kindly cover postage, but not any import tax or other shipping fees.
• When you have the book, it is up to you what you do with it. We recommend you share it between members of the team. LoCo Leaders: please don’t hog it for yourselves! I would also really appreciate if you write a review of the book on your nearest Amazon website.
• The deadline for getting your requests in Wed 2nd September 2009.

Make sure you get your requests in by the deadline, anything after that will be sent to the bit bucket.

If you have any questions or queries, feel free to drop me an email.

All in all a pretty sweet deal, methinks. Enjoy!