Jono Bacon @ Floss Weekly

Last week's Floss Weekly was really very interesting and funny. This show is part of Leo Laporte's Twit network and features on weekly schedule, various projects belonging to open source world.
With episode 65 Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte interviewed Jono Bacon the outstanding community manager of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Notwithstanding the imminent (at the show time) release of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, the purpose of the show was different. After a brief presentation of Jono's work and career at Canonical, the show focused on discussing the importance of communities for open source and free software projects and even commercial software in general.
Even though the discussion wasn't a geeky one, I mean they did not discuss of Ubuntu's new release or the trends in Ubuntu's development and marketing, I think they hit an interesting field too often overlooked by the open source and free software world. To support the economics behind free software it's not sufficient to create a consistent and refined product. Like an object belonging to an ecosystem, it's necessary to engineer how to deploy the product in the social environment. A product (and by this word I mean not just the software but all it's surroundings -website, documentation, brochures, etc..) must fulfill several requirements in this sense; it must be appealing, well documented, easy going and have a community to hold people together and attract new stakeholders. In this last aspect communities literally do the difference. Say that you're interested in learning 3D graphics it. There are a few open source choices and among those one project in particular (Blender) has a strong community representing an expanding sea of resources which metaphorically embraces the newcomer and reassure her/him with tutorials, free models a forum and even commercially available books and video guides.
Going back to the Floss episode, Jono Bacon also presented "The Art of Community" a book, published by O'Reilly, about to create and maintain a community which is going to be released either for free under a Creative Common License or for Purchase. The book is currently being written by Jono so it's scheduled for release during the next summer.
For more information read here below the very announcement of the book made by Jono on his blog

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...

For those that after having listened to the show think it's a pity it wasn't that into Ubuntu's behind the scenes, just know that Randal Schwartz announced a so called "FLOSSing with Bacon" project so we will hopefully hear from Jono very soon.
Finally, kudos to Leo and Randal for the great job they do in presenting open source and free software projects. With respect to what I've written above, they play an important role for the cause.