Los Angeles, Calif. — Jono Bacon, founder of Jono Bacon Consulting, delivered a keynote presentation titled “The Impact of the Ecosystem” at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America this week.
The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit consists of over 2,000 developers, operators and community leadership professionals to discuss and learn about the latest tech trends. Bacon is author of “The Art of The Community,” and frequently lectures on community strategy and execution, developer workflow, internet community development, among other topics. He specializes in helping organizations build both internal and external communities. His clients have included Hackerone, Sony Mobile, Huawei, GitLab and Microsoft.
During his presentation, Bacon discussed a new conference called the open community conference, which is being launched due to tremendous growth in the ecosystem. Approximately 78% of organizations are running open source and 66% are building open source, according to Bacon.
“This is exactly the kind of investment we want to see,” Bacon said. “When you zoom out a little bit and look at participation, not just in open source, but in social media, 3D printing and mapping, it taps into a core psychological interest in collaborating with people.”
The conference is designed to present how to build communities within an open source context. Areas covered include government management, conflict resolution, community strategy, among other topics.
The difficulty in building communities, according to Bacon, resides in various common challenges, including accidental versus intentional communities, disconnected strategic and technical value, designing an experience, and balancing expectations between the company and community.
In an effort to address these hurdles, Bacon developed a community participation model. The first steps involve pulling people and getting them to make a contribution — something of value that is of interest to them and adds value to the community. In order to sustain participation, Bacon suggests designing incentives that keep people moving forward, which consists of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Leadership is fostered within an organization whenever people participate in this process, explained Bacon.
“One of the goal’s of the open community conference is to provide a place to deliver that best practice,” said Bacon. The conferences is divided into three areas, including people who are going to build communities for their organization, networking and collaboration.
