As usual I have an idea. I was thinking to organize a course about Community Management at P2PU and a Manual, licensed under Creative Commons license with best practices, ideas, theory and so on.
Let’s do it.
I decided to be a facilitator and co-author for this project and I am searching for co-authors && contributors.
If you have experience leading (or being part of a great community) and/or creating communities, please drop me a note here and let’s start thinking what is the better way to do that. You can send me an email as well: shopov.bogomil at gmail got com or via twitter @bogomep
Why?
I know there are many books on community management, but they are mostly theoretical or encompass only a little of what is going on in the field, because the things in the Internet change with every second. Let’s create something open (as in Open Web) and Together (as in Sharing is Caring).
Love,
Bogo
Really Interesting, I would love to participate, I created the first mobile web community in latin america back in 2004, now dissapeared :( but I still have some insights and experiences that may be of interest.
Bogo, I agree. Literature (especially by Jono Bacon) isn’t bad at all, but interaction and “war stories” are good. If I can contribute, I’m happy. Keep me in the loop, I’m interested!
Oh, we should definitely talk.
As Max and Mel point out, we’ve been working with a small but growing community on “The Open Source Way”. This handbook is a canonical reference for how to use the open source way beyond software projects.
However, it is intended to be lightweight and more general. One goal is that multiple domain-specific books can be drawn from it or derived from its principles. For example, that could be a way that a FOSS community management book would fit – refer back to the main principles, then show how they are implemented specifically in the FOSS world. Such a book (which is what I think you are describing) would be a companion to the more nuts-and-bolts “Producing Open Source Software” (Fogel).
I’m very interested to hear what you think about The Open Source Way (TOSW); it’s clearly a work in progress, which is actually just following its own principles: http://bit.ly/TOSWTasks
Directly related, there is a community management wiki that has been growing over the last year. I think that fits as the heavyweight reference. One of the projects we need to get rolling is to do a comparison between the CM wiki and TOSW – find a way for the content to interact, etc.
Regarding a course, that’s definitely one that we’ve discussed around TOSW. I’ve recently had some discussions within the Teaching Open Source community (http://teachingopensource.org) about defining a scalable course around teaching the open source way. I would see a module/workshop/weeklong course that could be part of that model.
Best place to contact and discuss is via the mailing list. Let me know if you are interested:
http://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/tosw
Karsten Wade and others are writing at http://theopensourceway.org – I know there are a few more circles of community leaders (even open source community leaders!) online, but he keeps better track of those than I do. He’s quaid on IRC if you want to find him online.
I’d be happy to help. It’s a big part of what I do and care about.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Community_Architecture
http://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Main_Page