[...]... Erica, and all the ways she continues to make me smile CONTENTS FOREWORD FROM THE FIRST EDITION ix FOREWORD xi PREFACE xv 1 THE ART OF COMMUNITY Collaboration-Driven Ethos The Essence of Community The Basis of Communication Unwrapping Opportunity A Community Manager: Becoming the Community Moving Forward 1 2 4 8 10 13 19 2 PLANNING YOUR COMMUNITY Planning for Success Teams: The Building Blocks of Belonging... excitement: how on earth do we build an inspiring, engaging, and enjoyable community in our own walk of life? Toward the end of summer 2008 I received a phone call from Andy Oram, a well-respected author and editor at O’Reilly Although at the start of the call Andy was soliciting advice for building community in the educational world, the call ended by sowing the seeds for The Art of Community Andy’s... range of features available at the time of this writing, and likely will have many more when you get there: Download the book You can download the full version of the book, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license Stay up-to-date Get updates on the book, and share and read about success stories of communities that are using the book Discuss success stories The. .. programming language These synthetic languages are vessels of logic They live and breathe in a world where the answer to a question is either yes or no; there is no maybe In a world where maybe does not exist, you can plan ahead for an answer With community, the importance and diversity of the question is equally essential MAPPING OUT THE JOURNEY In this chapter we are going to be exploring the big-picture... and talk about great community building with other readers Learn more Stories, case studies, and other content are regularly published to the site, to help build your knowledge Provide feedback The website is a great place to leave feedback about the book for future editions In addition to the main website, you can also keep up-to-date with news on the book and other community- building stories on Twitter... collection of interviews from accomplished community builders about how they created their own inspirational communities to help round off your knowledge with the experiences of these leaders Chapter 15, Onward and Upward Finally, we close The Art of Community with some additional resources and events to continue your journey Each of these broad topics is a piece in the jigsaw puzzle, a note in the song,... had the pleasure of socializing with him, I found him a fun, smart, and entertaining part of the group In fact, at two of the live events, he was a guest in my home Social deviation was clearly not the answer, or if it was, he hid it well The reason why Ben was so involved in LugRadio, why Neil ran the Linux User Group meeting, and why thousands of other community members around the world get together,... various communities and their leaders enjoying the book and finding the content empowering Over the next few years I continued doing what I was doing; my Ubuntu community management team grew, Severed Fifth started taking off, I started doing the Shot Of Jaq podcast, and I got the Community Leadership Summit up and running Across these various projects and spending time with the folks involved I continued... with each building on what went before Let’s take a quick glance at the road ahead: 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. .. (membership in the code development teams was more exclusive, because the danger of messing things up was higher), but in the case of Hazy, I forgot The first thing Hazy did was integrate the Chinese translation of the manual seamlessly, so users could simply click a link to switch easily between the two languages Then, because he was an expert in our autopilot (he had, after all, been part of the team that . xv 1 THE ART OF COMMUNITY 1 Collaboration-Driven Ethos 2 The Essence of Community 4 The Basis of Communication 8 Unwrapping Opportunity 10 A Community Manager:. Bacon, in The Art of Community, takes you on a personal journey to the heart of what it takes to have and become part of a productive and well-oiled community. ” —AMBer