community management

I recently listed five best practices for community managers in 2014. Today, on Community Manager Appreciation Day, we've collected the wisdom of 14 great leaders from a variety of open source communities to find out:

What is the best thing about being a community manager?

 Here's what they said. » Read more

The role of community managers continues to evolve. I started to realize this after attending my first Community Leadership Summit earlier this year. My biggest take-away from it? Community management is an investment and its value is increasing. Heads up to employers: buy, buy, buy, and then invest some more. » Read more

Following my recent post on the initiatives now in place to rebalance the demographics of the Linux Kernel community, I would like to share a set of specific training activities to get beginners, specifically college students, involved in the kernel.

These were created by an enthusiastic group at Red Hat, including Matthew Whitehead and Priti Kumar, and unfolded on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), and State University of New York at Albany. » Read more

The Linux kernel is one of the largest and most successful open source projects today.

A report from the Linux Foundation addressing Who Writes Linux (2013) shows that recent releases of the Linux kernel, that happen now at 70-days intervals, include over 10,000 patches, made by more than 1,100 developers, representing over 225 corporations.

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Jason Hibbets wears many hats. One is red—he's a project manager for the open source leader, Red Hat. And, the rest are for newly defined roles in open source—including local government open source advocate and contributor. But, one of the biggest ways that Jason takes open source beyond technology is by highlighting the ways using open source software, hardware, and methodologies is changing business, education, government, law, and many more areas of our lives on Opensource.com. » Read more

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Leading communities as individually unique as those found in open source software is not a job that many people would want to take on. Yet, Greg DeKoenigsberg has done just that for not just one community but several major projects and organizations, for over a decade.

Seasoned through the early, gnarly years of the Fedora Project as the first Chairman of the Board as well as community leadership roles within Red Hat itself, Greg has embarked on a new adventure into the cloud with Eucalyptus as the Vice President of Community. » Read more

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A writer, community manager, and standards pundit—John Mertic is a jack of all trades. At SugarCRM, his official title is Solutions Architect and Community Manager. He is the author of two books: The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications and Building on SugarCRM: Creating Applications the Easy Way. And, he is a frequent conference speaker. We look forward to John's expertise at the upcoming All Things Open conference on October 23 and 24!

There's a lot going on in John's world these days—SugarCRM recently secured $40 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and is looking to make great strides in 2014. We also asked Mertic about his role at the OpenSocial Foundation. Discover more about Mertic, SugarCRM and the OpenSocial Foundation in his interview with me. » Read more

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Dave Stokes has worn a lot of hats in his career, from network engineer to CTO and beyond. He's someone eager to learn and who values communication, so he jumped at the chance to become a community manager for Oracle's MySQL project, a role he's now held for nearly four years.

Dave is one of the featured speakers at the upcoming All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. We caught up with him to learn more about his background, his motivation to work with open source, and to get a sneak preview of his presentation in October. » Read more

"Every year, the art and science of community management is becoming more predictable," said Jono Bacon, the Community Leadership Summit lead organizer. It’s becoming a renaissance, and over the last few years the practice is starting to be written down and documented. It’s evolving.

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Want to thank everyone who came to my session and who sent me wonderful feedback from both the keynote and the session. I was thrilled to see ZDnet wrote a piece about the keynote as well as have practioners, such as Sonya Barry, the Community Manager for Java write things like this about the longer session: » Read more