Online communities provide a wide range of opportunities for supporting a cause, marketing a product or service, or building open source software.

The Art of Community helps you recruit members, motivate them, and manage them as active participants. Author Jono Bacon offers experiences and observations from his 14-year effort to build and manage communities, including his current position as manager for Ubuntu.

Discover how your community can become a reliable support network, a valuable source of new ideas, and a powerful marketing force. This expanded edition shows you how to keep community projects on track, make use of social media, and organize collaborative events. Interviews with 12 community management leaders, including Linus Torvalds, Tim O'Reilly, and Mike Shinoda, provide useful insights.

Key Strategies for Building Your Community

• Develop specific objectives and goals for building your community
• Build processes to help contributors perform tasks, work together, and share successes
• Provide tools and infrastructure that enable members to work quickly
• Create buzz around your community to get more people involved
• Harness social media to broadcast information, collaborate, and get feedback
• Use several techniques to track progress on community goals
• Identify and manage conflict, such as dealing with divisive personalities