Symbian Blog

Hi, I’m Sebastian Brannstrom, Release Manager here at Symbian. Some time back I stumbled across a book called “The Art of Community” by Jono Bacon. It turns out that this book and I have a bit of common history.

A few years ago I discovered podcasting, this fantastic medium where everyone can make their own radio show and broadcast it to the world. It turned out to have a lasting effect on me. Firstly, because I still today listen to hours of podcasts every week. Secondly, because I found myself having to write my own open source podcasting application for Symbian. This led to a long chain of events that would eventually find me living here in London, working for the now open source Symbian Foundation.

As a Linux user, one of my favourite podcasts was “LugRadio”. It was produced by a group of Linux geeks in the UK, among them Jono Bacon. LugRadio was largely improvised, but it was fun, enthusiastic and very well produced. It gained a large following and eventually spawned a “conference” called LugRadio Live, equally well produced. In 2006 I attended LugRadio Live, and I had a great time.

LugRadio ended in 2008, partly because Jono Bacon had been recruited by Canonical as Community Manager for Ubuntu, my Linux distribution of choice. Over the last year or so he has been writing about his experience running various communities, and the result is “The Art of Community”.

This is a handbook on how to run a well organised community online. Some sections cater specifically to open source software projects, while others are more generic and apply to any kind of group effort. Plenty of anecdotes and examples are sprinkled throughout the book, which makes it a reasonably light read.

The book follows the evolution of a community from idea through engaging people, setting up infrastructure, building buzz and handling conflicts. Jono has tried to cover the whole picture of what makes up a great community, whether personalities, technologies or skills.

Areas covered over the nearly 400 pages include infrastructure setup, communication techniques, buzz building, event running, conflict resolution, process establishment and project governance. In every chapter, Jono refers back to experiences from his career, both failures and successes.

If you are running a community of any size, I highly recommend reading this book. Not everything may apply to your community, but for there is a lot in here for everybody.

For me working in the delivery management team at Symbian, the chapter on processes and workflow support were particularly useful. If my responsibilities were different, I’m sure I would have enjoyed other chapters equally. It is reaffirming to see that many points covered have been considered in the organization of the Symbian Foundation.

When you look at communities like Mozilla, Ubuntu or Symbian, it is easy to focus on the results (browsers and platforms) and overlook all the hard work that goes into organizing the community. Members join a community like Symbian hoping to get something out of it, and it is our job at the Symbian Foundation that all our members feel they do. Symbian is a great piece of technology, and it is all thanks to the wonderful community behind it.

“The Art of Community“ is available online at http://www.artofcommunityonline.org under a Creative Commons licence. Go download it, and if you enjoy it, support Jono by buying this great book!