I have been doing some thinking about the right way to govern Community Source recently. Sakai has been “experimenting” with what it means to be Community Source since 2004. We wonder if Community Source is different than Open Source and if so, how it it different.

Several things have triggered me to think more deeply about this in the last few weeks:

o Approaching first six months of being on the Sakai Board of Directors

o The Review of the Sakai Product Council after one year of its existence

o Seeing the Jono Bacon talk about the “Art of Community”

o Thinking about the upcoming Sakai Conference in Denver and thinking about the kinds of conversations that will happen there

So I decided to make and record a presentation that I titled, “The Art of Community Source” – with full homage to Jono Bacon’s book and talk title :).

Abstract
I start out by reviewing Jono Bacon’s (Ubuntu Community Manager) book and presentation titled “The Art of Community” and describe some of the concepts that come from Jono’s work. I then apply Jono’s terminology to the Moodle, Blackboard, Python, Apache, and Kuali projects to develop a way to categorize open and community source efforts. I then look at Sakai’s changing view of ‘Community Source’ as we transitioned from one executive director (me) to another (Michael Korkuska). I review what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of community structure under both leaders and then suggest how we can improve our current structure – in particular – how we need to adjust our definition of the Sakai Product Council to remove some of the tension in our current structure.

My Slides:  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/talks/2010/2010-05-08-art-of-community-source.pdf

Jono Bacon’s Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKOrWubmzAY
Jono Bacon’s Web Site: http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/

I continue down the path I lay out in this talk in more detail in my review and comments of the Sakai Product Council. I have some recommendations as to how to adjust the remit of the Product Council going forward at:

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MGT/Chuck+Product+Council+Review+Comments

As always – comments are welcome.