Building an Open Community
This book is 11% complete
Last updated on 2013-05-23
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
Since 2008 I launched multiple communities at the crossing of creativity and technology: #museomix • http://artgameweekend.com • Dorkbot Paris • http://responsivemuseum.com • http://codinggouter.org
In 2008 and 2009 I participated in growing the Drupal France community from a dozen of people at a first meetup to setting up a 900-participants Drupalcon Paris. It took multiple realspace events, including a dedicated experimental new event format for helping NGOs, and many, many online conversations with consensus mode on :-)
Since 2011 I'm the community building specialist and co-founder of Museomix, an international community of museum geeks. We focus on setting up yearly community-driven, hackaton-like 3 days events in museums. The museum stays open to the public during the event! We over-design the event pace and milestones, so that real, working hardware prototypes are actually build in 3 days, and can be experimented by the public as new museum experiences.
In 2013, there will be 6 Museomix events in 6 museums in France, UK and Canada, during the same weekend. http://museomix.com
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