Creating a Movement through Community with Jono Bacon

The Business of Open Source

Jono Bacon’s passion for building communities has been a driving force in a career taken him from Canonical to GitHub to founding the Community Leadership Core community accelerator. In this episode, Jono shares his definition of community, how a community can create a movement and the differences between the two. We also get a bit of insight into how he developed his passion for building communities and why he continues helping companies build and support theirs through the Community Leadership Core. When Jono speaks about communities he is involved with, he uses “we” instead of “I” to describe their achievements, so I had him dig into that a bit more as we explored the power dynamics that have a huge influence on the success of a community or movement.

Highlights:

• I introduce Jono, who is the founder of Community Leadership Core (0:28)
• Jono shares more about his passion for building communities and why he started Community Leadership Core (0:51)
• Jono goes into his background, discovering how Linux was created, and finding connection to others through open source (2:47)
• Jono reflects on his time at Canonical and what he learned (10:46)
• How Jono defines and thinks about “community” (13:10)
• The difference between building a community and creating a movement (15:50)
• Using “we” vs “I” in communities to encourage collaboration (18:05)
• Where Jono sees companies missing the mark in community building (20:03)
• Jono explains what delivery looks like in the context of community (22:31)
• Jono shares examples of successful communities (27:05)
• Communities Jono enjoys participating in (28:44)
• How to start a community from scratch (31:22)
• A quick summary of the Community Leadership Core (32:40)

Links:

Jono

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonobacon
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonobacon
• Company: communityleadershipcore.com