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Archive for the ‘Free Culture’ Category


Posted on November 9, 2009 - by jono

Canonical and Creative Commons Meet Donations Target

Melissa from the Creative Commons pointed me to the rather good news that Canonical’s offer to match Creative Commons donations up to $3000 has already been matched:

Just five days ago we announced that Canonical would be generously matching every donation dollar for dollar for the next week – up to $3,000. Well, we met that goal in record time! Thanks to everyone who donated in the past five days and had your donation doubled – for a total of $6,000 going toward our annual campaign to sustain CC!

Many thanks to Canonical for their ongoing support of free culture and Creative Commons.

We still have a long way to go to reach our $500,000 goal for this year’s campaign, so please donate today and show your support for a culture of sharing!

Thanks to everyone who donated, and if you haven’t donated yet, go and contribute!


Posted on November 5, 2009 - by jono

Canonical Matching Creative Commons Donations

Here at Canonical we are all big fans of the Creative Commons. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they have created a set of Free Culture licenses that make it simple for people to release open content. They also run a variety of resources to make finding and remixing content simple and empowering.

In the Ubuntu community we have celebrated these freedoms with the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase: a competition in which we select free culture content that is included with each Ubuntu release. In addition to this, I am personally a huge fan of the Creative Commons: I have released two albums (The Big Red Recording and the debut Severed Fifth album) and my recent book The Art of Comunity under Creative Commons licenses. All of my blog entries are similarly licensed.

A little while back Melissa Reader from the Creative Commons emailed me asking if Canonical would be interested in matching donations made to the Creative Commons up to a maximum of $3000 over the period of a week. This means that if you donate $1 to the Creative Commons, Canonical will also provide $1 until the $3000 total has been reached. I am proud that Canonical are able to support this worthy campaign.

Remember, this is going to happen only for the next week, so go and DONATE!


Posted on October 22, 2009 - by jono

Wild And Wicked Wolverhampton Weekend

Tomorrow I fly to England back to Wolverhampton for LugRadio Live 2009. I have been over in California now for over a year and it will be the first time I have got to see many of my friends since I moved. It will also be the final re-union of the LugRadio team for the last ever live show and last ever LugRadio Live. It is going to be a blast!

Although LugRadio Live is entirely sold out of tickets, there is going to be one hell of a party on the Friday night at The Hogshead, 186 Stafford Street, Wolverhampton, WV1 1NA from 7.30pm and also on the Saturday night at the The Connaught Hotel, 40-50 Tettenhall Rd, Wolverhampton, WV1 4SW from 8pm. On the Saturday there will be Karaoke. Oh yes. Everyone is welcome to both parties, and I would love to see you all there! :-)

The fun doesn’t end there though, oh no! On the Sunday, the first ever OggCamp is going to take place at The Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton, and it is shaping up to be an incredible event. The organizers behind it, the venerable Ubuntu UK and Linux Outlaws podcasts, have worked hard to make it a rocking event and I can’t wait for it! I really hope it becomes a staple in the UK Open Source event calendar. So, good people, get your delicate arses over to OggCamp too. :-)

What a rollicking weekend of Open Source goodness, firmly seated in the great British heartlands:

  • Friday 23rd October – Party at The Hogs Head in Wolverhampton.
  • Saturday 24th October – LugRadio Live 2009 and party at The Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton.
  • Sunday 25th October – OggCamp at The Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton.

I look forward to seeing you all there!


Posted on August 19, 2009 - by jono

The Art of Community Now Available

After months of writing, editing, copy-editing, reviews and production, I am pleased to announce the general availability of The Art of Community! The book is printed and on its way to bookstores – it may take a few days for it to hit your local bookstore or regional online store.

This is a book that I have been working on since November, designed to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. The book covers the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales.

While the book draws from my experience in Open Source and cites the experience of others in other communities, the book is not explicitly designed for technical communities and the content is applicable to any community of any size. This has been a deliberate decision: I am really keen that anyone from a knitting group to a neighbourhood watch group to a political activism group to a globally distributed Open Source project can get some real value from the book.

Throughout the eleven chapters and 360+ pages the book covers the major elements of building strong community:

  • Foreword by Leo Laporte – emmy award-winning broadcaster and founder of the TWiT Network provides a thoughtful foreword, complete with his expected wit and repartee.
  • Preface
  • Chapter 1 – The Art of Community – We begin the book with a bird’s-eye view of how communities function at a social science level. We cover the underlying nuts and bolts of how people form communities, what keeps them involved, and the basis and opportunities behind these interactions.
  • Chapter 2 – Planning Your Community – Next we carve out and document a blueprint and strategy for your community and its future growth. Part of this strategy includes the target objectives and goals and how the community can be structured to achieve them.
  • Chapter 3 – Communicating Clearly – At the heart of community is communication, and great communicators can have a tremendously positive impact. Here we lay down the communications backbone and the best practices associated with using it.
  • Chapter 4 – Processes: Simple Is Sustainable – We then move on to focus on putting the facilities in place for your community to do great things. In this chapter we build simple, effective, and nonbureaucratic processes that enable your community to conduct tasks, work together, and share their successes.
  • Chapter 5 – Supporting Workflow with Tools – We continue our discussion of community facilities to build workflows that are driven by accessible, sensible, and rock-solid tools that enable your contributors to do great work quickly and easily.
  • Chapter 6 – Building Buzz – With a solid foundation in place, we move on to build excitement and buzz around your community and encourage and enthuse every man, woman, dog and pony to get involved and participate.
  • Chapter 7 – Measuring Community – Although many consider community hand-wavey and unmeasurable, this chapter confronts the myth and guides you in tracking, monitoring, and otherwise measuring the work going on the community so it can be optimized and simplified.
  • Chapter 8 – Governance – Our next stop is the wide-ranging and seemingly complex topic of governance. We explore what options are available for a low-friction, capable, and representative governance strategy for your community.
  • Chapter 9 – Handling Conflict – One of the most sensitive topics in community leadership is handling conflict. In this chapter we explore how to identify, handle, and prevent irksome conflict; handle divisive personalities; and unblock problems.
  • Chapter 10 – Creating and Running Events – Events offer an excellent opportunity for your community to bond, be productive, and have fun, and this is where we cast our beady eye in our penultimate chapter.
  • Chapter 11 – Hiring a Community Manager – Finally, we close The Art of Community with some advice and guidance for organizations who want to hire a community manager to conduct and implement the wide range of topics that we have discussed throughout the book.
  • Index
  • Colophon

The book is further augmented with an active website complete with discussion, articles and updated news and content about The Art of Community. You can find out more at www.artofcommunityonline.org.

Reviews

I am proud to see that the The Art of Community has already received some glowing reviews and it got a great response from everyone we put the book in front of as part of the review period. Here are some of the reviews:

“In the age of participation, there is no better tour guide than Jono Bacon. The Art of Community teaches leaders how to increase collaboration and authenticity to build belonging. This isn’t just for technology leaders; anyone who wants to harness community for their cause should read this book.”

— Amanda McPherson, The Linux Foundation


“The Internet provides the potential to separate us into a cacophony of discordant voices or to congregate us as purpose-driven communities. Jono Bacon, in his insightful ‘The Art of Community’, teaches the latter path, detailing the principles of successful community-building in a way that will appeal to both neophyte and expert alike. Given the increasingly critical role of community managers in the technology industry and beyond, ‘The Art of Community’ should find a place on any businessperson’s bookshelf, not to mention that of the PTA president, book club organizer, or union activist. Yes, it’s that good”.

— Matt Asay, Alfresco and C|NET


“Jono Bacon truly understands communities–and more importantly, how to build communities that thrive. This is the definitive guidebook to building successful communities–definitive because it is based on Jono’s extensive experience as community manager for Ubuntu, a product that inspires an Apple-esque devotion in very large part because of its vast and dedicated community. For developers and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to tap into the power of community, as Ubuntu has done so masterfully, this book is a must-read”.

— Ian Murdock, founder of Debian and Vice President of Emerging Platforms at Sun


“One thing that’s impressed me about Jono Bacon, something one can notice back when he and others were building a community around their pioneering Linux podcast, is that he simply gets the concept of community. It comes out in most everything he says, and most every decision he makes. This is the kind of a person you want writing a book on the topic. open source community building cannot be boiled down to a formula. It’s a constant effort, a soft science, an art, and Bacon is an ideal art teacher”.

— Dan Goldstein, Professor of Marketing, London Business School and Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research


“The success of the open source software movement demonstrates that no obstacle is insurmountable when people come together around a shared vision. In ‘The Art of Community’, Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon gives readers a profound glimpse into his hands-on experience as the orchestrator of one of the movement’s most powerful communities. His book offers valuable lessons on effective leadership and community building. Its compelling combination of useful theory, real-world best practices, and instructive personal anecdotes make it a richly comprehensive guide for both aspiring and experienced community leaders”.

— Ryan Paul, Ars Technica

There are many more reviews available on this page , including reviews from:

  • Danese Cooper, Open Source Diva and OSI Director
  • Mark R. Hinkle, Vice President of Community, Zenoss Inc.
  • Pete Kronowitt, Linux and Open Source Strategist, Intel
  • Jeremy Garcia, Founder of LinuxQuestions.org
  • Irina Slutsky, geekentertainment.tv
  • Don Marti, Conference Chair, OpenSource World and Organizer, Windows Refund Day, Burn All GIFs Day, Free Dmitry, and FreedomHEC.
  • Paul Cooper, Moblin UI & Apps Engineering Manager, Intel
  • Seif Lotfy, GNOME Foundation, Zeitgeist Co-Founder and Team Leader
  • David Schlesinger – Director, Open Source Technologies, ACCESS Co., Ltd.; GNOME Foundation Advisory Board Member”
  • Amber Graner, Ubuntu Community Member

As the book gets more reviews I will be updating that page. But you, dear reader, would you like to write a review of The Art of Community? If so, send the review text with your name and affiliation to jono AT jonobacon DOT org!

Availability

The book is available from all good bookshops and should start appearing in your local bookshops soon. You can also buy the book online from a variety of stores. Many of you use Amazon, so here are some links to the product pages:

The book is also available in electronic book format:

(prices may have changed when you visit these websites)

The book will also be freely available shortly under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike Non-Commercial license. It’s availability will be announced soon.

Build Some Book Buzz

If you would like to seat yourself firmly in the complete and totally frikken awesome person category and would like to help spread the word about the book, it would be fantastic if you could Twitter / identi.ca / Facebook / blog about the book, and importantly, provide a review for the book on Amazon. We also have some buttons available for your website too:

Art Of Community Website Button Art Of Community Website Button

Official button.

Add the following code to your website to add this button: <a href="http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3597/3516061651_8910ba25c9_m.jpg" alt="Art Of Community"></a>
Art Of Community Website Button Art Of Community Website Button

Official button.

Add the following code to your website to add this button: <a href="http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3310/3516110235_bc1c0116e2_m.jpg" alt="Art Of Community"></a>

Thanks to everyone who was involved in making this project a reality. I am really excited about this 1st Edition and I look forward to hearing your stories about how it has helped energize your communities – do let me know! :-)

Also, if you use IRC, do come and join us in #artofcommunity on irc.freenode.net and join in the fun. :-)

Go and Digg this!


Posted on June 13, 2009 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit Update

A while back I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 in San Jose on the 18th and 19th July 2009. Well, I think it is time for lil’ update on what is shaping up to be a rocking event.

The aim of the summit is get community managers, leaders and organizers together to discuss, debate and share ideas on building great community in a vendor-neutral environment. The event is entirely free (although I ask everyone to go and register and it takes place the weekend immediately before OSCON, in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Details of how to get there are here.

Since I announced the event, the response has been stunning and over 150 people have registered with a fantastic and diverse range of contributors signed up to attend. You can see this awesome list of attendees here.

The the aim and purpose of the event to provide an open, transparent and vendor-neutral environment for discussion, and I have been really keen to make sure this is an unconference (an event in which an empty schedule is available at the start of the event, and attendees can go and add topics). The reason for this is to ensure the sessions are as diverse as possible and not merely what I think we should discuss. The openness of the scheduling means that anyone can add a session that they think would be of interest to the other attendees.

If you are coming along and interested in running a session, feel free to discuss it on this wiki page with the other attendees: you may find some other people who would like to help with the session. Speaking of the wiki, we also have rideshare, roomshare and other pages springing up to make attending the event as easy and enjoyable as possible.

I have another update on the event half-penned, but I will send that over in the coming week. Stay tuned, and go and register! I hope to see you there!


Posted on June 13, 2009 - by jono

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase Kicks Off

Folks, we are back with another Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing Free Software and Free Culture, and with each development cycle we present the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere. I am always hugely inspired by the wonderful entries that we recieve in each competition and I am excited about the opportunities we have to ship awesome Free Culture content with Karmic!

The winning submissions will be made available on the shipped CDs and download images of the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Every user will be able to find the content in the Examples/ folder in a home directory.

With this competition we are accepting submissions for audio, video, and graphic/photo submissions. We have a winner to find for each category, and the competition closes on 16th July 2009. The time is short on this competition, so you better get cracking on some stunning entries!

Entering the showcase is simple:

  • Your submission must be one of the following:
    • Audio Entries – no larger than 1MB in size – made available in Ogg Vorbis format.
    • Video Entries – no larger than 2.5MB in size – made available in Ogg Theora format.
    • Photo/Graphic Entries – no larger than 0.5MB in size – made available in PNG or JPG formats.
  • All entries must be licensed and distributable under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike or Creative Commons Attribution license.
  • Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
  • Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
  • When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 16th July 2009 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.


Posted on April 19, 2009 - by jono

Interviewed on FLOSSWeekly

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of doing an interview on the rather excellent FLOSSWeekly podcast with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz. On it I talk Community, Ubuntu, Art Of Community, Canonical, Severed Fifth and more. Check it out here.


Posted on April 12, 2009 - by jono

Community Leadership Summit 2009

Community Leadership Summit - 18th - 19th July 2009 - San Jose, California

Just a quick message to let you all know that today I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 on the 18th and 19th July 2009 in San Jose, California. The event takes place the weekend before OSCON in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The goal is simple: if those passionate about building great communities can get together to compare notes and discuss and debate these topics, we will all benefit from better communities.

The summit gathers together community managers, leaders and organizers as well as the projects, organizations, commercial vendors, ISVs and others who have an interest in building a strong and enabled community. The purpose of the event is to get everyone together to talk about the many nuances of building strong and effective community, such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and more.

The event is very much a summit: it’s primary focus is around discussion. It will be run in the style of an unconference; a clear and open schedule in which attendees can volunteer sessions and engage with other attendees. This will ensure the summit packs in a healthy chunk of diversity, covering a wide range of topics and perspectives. In addition to the discussions the summit will feature some scheduled presentations, panel discussions and social events.

The event is entirely free, but you need to pre-register here. You can read more about the event at www.communityleadershipsummit.com.

In its first day day many community managers have signed up to attend such as Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier (OpenSuSE Community Manager – Novell), Dave Neary (GNOME Foundation Board Member – Neary Consulting), Brian Proffitt (Community Manager – Linux Foundation), David “Lefty” Schlesinger (Linux Foundation Mobile Advisory Board, GNOME Foundation), Karsten Wade – (Fedora Community Leader – Red Hat) and John Mark Walker (Community Manager – Collab.net). Rock and roll. :-)


Posted on January 14, 2009 - by jono

The Art Of Community

Today I am proud as punch to announce the Art Of Community.

A while back I was approached by Andy Oram, a senior editor at O’Reilly to write a definitive book about how to grow, build and energise a community. This book will be called the Art Of Community.

The book covers a wide range of topics designed to build strong community. This includes the structure and social economy behind community, building effective and easy to use infrastructure, setting up community processes, creating buzz and excitement, governance, conflict resolution, scalability and more.

This book is much more than merely a textbook on building a compelling community. I believe that we learn how to build strong community through the exchange of stories and experiences. We all have great insight into community. These stories are illustrative vessels for important lessons and subtleties in how great communities work. The Art Of Community is a compendium of stories, anecdotes and experiences inside and outside the Open Source world. These stories illustrate the many concepts scattered throughout the book, and many of these stories will include some of you reading this and your projects.

I am currently part-way through the writing process, and we have an expected release date this summer.

The release of Art Of Community is actually rather exciting. The book will be available in two forms.

  • Firstly, there will be a normal printed copy available to buy. This will be available from the usual places you can buy O’Reilly books.
  • Secondly, The book will also be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. This provides everyone with the opportunity to share, modify and re-use the content.

O’Reilly has my utmost respect for embracing the Creative Commons. This is a great opportunity for O’Reilly, Creative Commons content and community building.

In addition to the announcement, I am also pleased to announce a website devoted to the book over at www.artofcommunityonline.org.

The website will feature updates, sneak peeks of the content, profiles of the topics and stories in the book, profiles of the editors and proof readers and more. I am really keen to hear your stories and experiences, and there will be plenty of opportunities to get involved in the discussion. Also, when we release the book, the top ten posters with the most number of comments on the articles there will get a free signed printed copy of the book.

So, exciting times. Lots of work, but exciting times nonetheless. Lets get rolling…

DIGG


Posted on December 2, 2008 - by jono

Governments And Free Content Policies

A nice little story for those of you who may have missed it.

Last week Larry Lessig blogged about how the new change.gov site for Obama included the following at the bottom of the page:

CONTENT COPYRIGHT © 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Larry pointed to Chris Messina’s post asking why a Creative Commons license was not used. When I read the post, I agreed with both of their sentiments.

Well, it seems Obama’s staff are pretty responsive: they have switched the content to a CC-BY license, the freest of CC licenses. Larry has the details here. Gobama!

It seems that the positioning of the question regarding government content is skewed. Instead of the question being “why should we license this content under a free license?” it should be “why should we NOT license this content under a free license?“. Of course, this change in approach is a mindset change. It requires participants to adjust their expectations of the norm to be a Free Culture society as opposed to a restricted society.

To me this is the most important goal for members of the Free Culture community to seek. We have the licenses, we have publishing systems, and we have a growing catalogue of content, but what we don’t have is a change in mindset (yet). This change will happen, but it will take time and many more examples such as this one.

I used to be quite involved in (UK) government use and policy attitudes towards Free Software back when I worked at OpenAdvantage and have since stepped back from it quite a bit. I wonder what kind of policy changes and persuasions need to occur for the policy to be justification for NOT publishing free content as opposed to the current norm. Anyone have any insights into this?