Jono Bacon’s book The Art of Community is now available for download.

We mentioned the beginning of this project back in January of this year. Just 8 months later the digital version of the book is available for everyone to download and share under a CC BY-NC-SA license. You can download it from the book’s webpage here.

The Art of Community isn’t just written for current or would-be community managers. It outlines and discusses all of the issues that are pertinent to simply working with a dispersed community of contributors. These issues are:

• Sustainable processes for management – how to create day to day processes that are simple, effective and always representative of your community and its members.
• Tools and infrastructure – give your community simple and friction-free tools that they need to do their work, complete with effective communication channels.
• Building buzz – think outside the box and excite and enthuse potential community members to join your crusade, build capacity and keep the train running.
• Measuring aspects of community success – understand, assess and measure your community, discover what can be measured and how to react to the results.
• Conflict management – manage strong personalities that clash, and untangle contentious situations in the open and transparent manner that your community expects.
• Handling live events – organize and schedule productive, fun and engaging live events that get things done and re-affirm social bonds between your community members.
• Scaling the community – as your community grows, things change and adjust to the size, scale and throughput of your membership: handle these changes with as little disruption as possible.

If you are at all interested in what it takes to run a successful community, this book written by the Ubuntu Community Manager will help shed some light on the complex, yet fun, aspects of community management.