I just received my pre-ordered copy of the Art of Community and wow! I am learning so much already. Jono Bacon is the author, and his experiences with communities come from years with the open source Linux project and now Ubuntu.
I believe many types of communities can benefit from reading this book, from professional organizations to preschool boards. So far I’ve only read about bikeshedding, governance, and conflict resolution, both areas I need to know how to handle!
The book opens with a story of a teen-aged boy racing across England to go to a meeting with people he has only met on the Internet – and he’s late! I loved this story as a hook for the book.
It reminded me of my own first-time experience with “Internet friends” (as the friend’s wife in the story calls the group.) My perspective was as a girlfriend whose boyfriend had the “Internet friends.” 🙂 Here’s my story.
It was the mid-nineties and my boyfriend Paul was working at a university as a system administrator. In his spare time, he stumbled across a group with a single goal that captured his attention – the distributed.net team, the Internet’s first general-purpose distributed computing project. Their goal was to win a contest to crack or decode an encryption key using many computers, each one doing a small amount of the calculation work.
From Cincinnati, Paul got more involved with their project, and chatted with the group on IRC quite a bit. As strange as it sounds, I got to know the group through their IRC handles – cow, dbaker, Nugget, Moonwick, and decibel, to name a few. One week they decided it would be great to get together for dinner in Indianapolis. My girlfriends from college who lived in Indianapolis didn’t quite know what I was talking about. “You’re coming to visit? And visiting us as well as some new friends of your new boyfriend? And he only knows them through the computer?”
Paul and I drove over from Cincinnati to Indianapolis, about a two-hour drive. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I trusted Paul knew these guys well enough to want to hang out. I was a tagalong but my curiosity, which I have in abundance, was piqued. Would the first meeting be awkward or natural? Would I have anything to talk to them about?
As it turns out, we had a fun time at a fondue restaurant. We were stuffed full of food and good laughs. The guys happily played with their gadgets – Palm Pilots were the popular one of the time.
Oh, good times. That meeting was the first of many for our group. We traveled to Atlanta later to scope out different locations for a company and at the end of that quest, many of them moved to Austin to work at the United Devices startup company in 2000.