Building an Open Community
Building an Open Community
An easy to follow roadmap. Start an open creative community from scratch. Grow it into a big, active, impactful group of contributors.
About the Book
CC-BY-SA Building an Open Community is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. That means that you can share it with your friends, copy it, remix it and distribute it as you like, as long as you attribute the work to me and put the derivated and distributed works under the exact same CC-BY-SA license.
This is version 0.2, an early draft. The price is $2 for this version, the next version will be priced double, at $4. You will get all updates to this book for free. Chapters will be expanded, phrases will be rewritten. Pictures and figures will be added. You are paying for an early draft, but you will end up getting a finished, complete book. Isn't it nice? Tell your friends about it ;-)
An easy to follow book-roadmap to build your community
- Start an open creative community from scratch (just you and an issue you want to address).
- Grow it into an active, big and impactful group of contributors.
-
Use the power of open creative communities to make things happen.
It's based on my experience growing Drupal France 2008-2009 and Museomix 2011-2013
It's also based on the repeated formula for instant micro-community launches used with OrsayCommons, ArtGame weekend, Responsive Museum Week, Coding Goûter…
Why this book? Isn't there many books on community building?- This book is a roadmap, so you can start where you are today, and follow the path
- Social networks have totally changed community building - in an unexpected way!
- It has made people meet more in physical spaces, in meetups.
- Events are crucials.
- This book doesn't assume you already have a community. You can start with a community of one, ie. you!
- They are many books out there on community *management*,
- or books that are written as if you already had dozens of people with you and your problem was planning your community in advance.
- But today, your problem is to start your community from scratch.
- Or today, your problem is get it from a dozen of people to many more.
- Do you care today about managing conflicts in a huge mailing list?
- Well, maybe you are not there. Or you are, or will be.
- In all case, what you need is to have a map, starting from where you are *right now*.
- I didn't found a book that was a community building roadmap, so I decided to write it!
- Open Creative ommunities are powerful
- They will turn your idea into reality
- They will make your idea into something better, unexpected, wider and more fun!
- Open Creative Communities are hard to start and grow
- They don't just happen
- Drupal
- Linux
- Wikipedia
- They are many ways to start them,
- They are many people telling you how to *manage* them
- Management is for settled organizations, not for growing communities
- an open community is always growing and shrinking, at the same time
- Open Communities are easier than ever to start and grow
- Because of, you know, that little thing called the Internet :-)
The chapters
- Forewords for the alpha-readers
- Community? What are we talking about here?
- Why this book? Isn’t there many books on community building?
- From you to two: starting a community from scratch
- From ten to open: transparency and inclusion
- From many to massive: close collaboration at scale
- Webography: learning from great articles
License
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Forewords for the alpha-readers
- Community? What are we talking about here?
- A quick review of existing types of communities
- open creative communities
- Why this book? Isn’t there many books on community building?
- This book is a roadmap
- This book don’t distinguish between online or offline communities
- But why building open communities?
- From you to two
- Be ultra precise on the issue you want to solve, the frustration you want to lift, the injustice you want to stop.
- The mullet website
- have a short, simple, I-could-tell-it-to-you-in-a-casual-conversation manifesto
- Use an event to focus everybody on the core issue
- I heard I need to seed my community for months and months?
- The mullet website
- From ten to open
- when is the time right for opening?
- Be radically transparent
- Have every conversation in public by default
- Give new comers ways to listen, to learn the culture
- Be radically inclusive
- Be polite!
- Represent your community at events, talks, blogs…
- Host meetups
- Tell the story of how things are coming together
- Community platform
- Don’t act like if you had 1 millions members
- From many to massive
- Fish for diversity
- You’ll have to account for various languages : English is the international language, but local communities will want to do things in their own native language too
- Identity and values are key
- Close collaboration on a massive scale
- Help growing smaller inside communities
- Call for help!
- Built up simple[what does simple mean???] programs to suck in volunteers
- Give the power/responsibility to represent your community to everyone that want to do it
- a community is always growing and shrinking, at the same time
- Webography
- Dunbar neocortex groups and language
- increasing FOSS participation
- CatB and the good critical article
- Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
- your community is your best feature
- Open Advice Book
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