jonobacon@home

Last week Benjamin Otte shared some thoughts about GNOME that were pretty stark. It gathered some steam and hit Slashdot and this all happened the week GUADEC was taking place in A Coruña. I wasn’t at GUADEC but I can imagine there was some fervent discussion about the blog entry. The gist of Benjamin’s blog [...]

Those lovely people at ZDNet have let me write a guest post about community, and I have contributed an article called Failure as a springboard to success. The article talks about how if we embrace our failures in our communities, it can help us become better community members, and provides a model for doing so. [...]

With Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 now out the door and momentum building towards a rocking Karmic Koala release, it is time to name and share the direction and focus for the next step in the Ubuntu evolution that follows Karmic. To do this I want to pass on some words from Mark Shuttleworth, the founder [...]

Recently I have been thinking a lot about how we can refine and improve how we report problems and issues in the Ubuntu community. I shared some thoughts about this a little while back and I have been talking with many people inside the Ubuntu community, at the Community Leadership Summit, and with our Community [...]

Today I have a little story followed by an idea that I want to share with you all. A few weeks back I stepped out to go and grab a coffee. I headed over to my local independent coffee shop where I get on well with the owners. Like many small businesses, they have been [...]

Today I just wanted to share a few thoughts on a much under-used and sometimes overlooked component in growing great communities: validation. Every community is an organically grouped bundle of people, many of which spend their free time choosing to be part of that community. With the majority of communities being associative volunteer-based groups, our [...]

Recently I have been sending the completed Art Of Community manuscript out to a number of people who are well respected in various communities to get there feedback on the completed book. Some of these quotes are here. Wow.

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, [...]

Recently the tubes have been ablaze with chatter of where the somewhat popular topic of community management should fit into an organisation. When the coin is flipped, said chatterers have been debating whether to place their bets on either Marketing and Engineering as an apt destination for the reporting line. Do we expect our community [...]

Many of you will know my general policy for not getting involved in flame-wars and I was not going to comment on this story, but I just wanted to share a few words. Of course, the story is saddening: a woman bought a computer to do her classwork, it contained Ubuntu, and her expectations were [...]