Stephen Fanjoy

Jono, who is the community manager for Ubuntu, started out his presentation by asking what communities can do to build and improve the sense of belonging that people have in their community. After talking a little about what belonging means, he threw out the first concrete concept that builds belonging: Stories. Jono suggests that "Stories are vessels of best practice." Whenever a community shares a story, it usually has a message attached to it--an anecdote that usually comes to some concrete point. 

He went on to talk about how open source communities are meritocracies. People in our communities rise to higher levels because of the work they do. Communities are also economies--gift economies that work on patches, rather than money.

Next Jono talked about the "Quality of Aliveness" as a factor in building belonging in a community. He gave the example of seeing a 5 year old kid use Ubuntu and how he felt the hairs on his neck stand up. These visceral experiences give us a feeling of accomplishment and that our efforts in communities are worth our time. These experiences provide a strong sense of belonging to a community.

Jono's next point illustrated that teams present vessels of belonging. For instance when you first build a team everyone is lost and no one feels at ease. But once you get to know your "local neighborhood" a little, you begin to feel comfortable. The key for building strong teams is to foster environments where people can feel like they belong and they know what to do. Provide advocacy, podcasts, translations, support, and put on local events--these all help contributors succeed and motivate them to stay involved.

Then Jono rhetorically asked how social capital in teams grows. The Ubuntu team utilizes karma in the launchpad web application, a hall of fame, highlighting people on blogs and in summits. Teams need to build some infrastructure since most people need others to celebrate their contributions. Most valuable contributors don't toot their own horns about their work--social capital grows most when teams have means to highlight the efforts of their contributors. Its best not to push people into management jobs, but to let the community organize itself. For instance, social captial builds naturally through conversations in the halls of conferences like OSCON and during project meetings/summits. Sharing stories and introducing yourself to others helps build your personal social capital.

Strive to keep a positive attitude at all times, even when dealing with problems and criticism.  People who have a glass-half-empty attitude (as opposed to half-full) can drag an entire community down. The team's attitude carries a lot of weight--a project with a "kick ass" attitude can win a ton of mind-share over projects that have negative attitudes.

Here is a slightly abreviated excerpt of Guy's advice on writing a startup business business plan:

1. Write for all the right reasons. Most people write business plans to attract investors, and while this is necessary to raise money, most venture capitalists have made a “gut level” go/no go decision during the PowerPoint pitch. Receiving (and possibly reading) the business plan is a mechanical step in due diligence. The more relevant and important reason to write is a business plan, whether you are raising money or not, is to force the management team to solidify the objectives (what), strategies (how), and tactics (when, where, who). 
2. Make it a solo effort. While creation of the business plan should be a group effort involving all the principal players in the company, the actual writing of the business plan--literally sitting down at a computer and pounding out the document--should be a solo effort. And ideally the CEO should do it because she will need to know the plan by heart.
3. Pitch, then plan. The correct sequence is to perfect a pitch (10/20/30), and then write the plan from it. Write this down: A good business plan is an elaboration of a good pitch; a good pitch is not the distillation of good business plan. Why? Because it's much easier to revise a pitch than to revise a plan. Think of your pitch as your outline, and your plan as the full text.
4. Put in the right stuff. Here's what a business plan should address: Executive Summary (1), Problem (1), Solution (1), Business Model (1), Underlying Magic (1), Marketing and Sales (1), Competition (1), Team (1), Projections (1), Status and Timeline (1), and Conclusion (1). Essentially, this is the same list of topics as a PowerPoint pitch. Those numbers in parenthesis are the ideal lengths for each section; note that they add up to eleven. As you'll see in a few paragraphs, the ideal length of a business plan is twenty pages, so I've given you nine pages extra as a fudge factor.
5. Focus on the executive summary. The executive summary, all one page of it, is the most important part of a business plan. If it isn't fantastic, eyeball-sucking, and pulse-altering, people won't read beyond it to find out who's on your great team, what's your business model, and why your product is curve jumping, paradigm shifting, and revolutionary. You should spend eighty percent of your effort on writing a great executive summary.
6. Keep it clean. The ideal length of a business plan is twenty pages or less, and this includes the appendix. For every ten pages over twenty pages, you decrease the likelihood that the plan will be read, much less funded, by twenty-five percent. When it comes to business plans, less is more. The reality is that the purpose of a a business plan is to get to the next step: continued due diligence with activities such as checking personal and customer references. The tighter the thinking, the shorter the plan; the shorter the plan, the faster it will get read.
7. Provide a one-page financial projection plus key metrics. Do everyone a favor: Reduce your Excel hallucinations to one page and provide a forecast of the key metrics of your business--for example, the number of paying customers. These key metrics provide insight into your assumptions. 
8. Catalyze fantasy. Don't include citations of some consulting firm's supposed validation of your market. For example, “Jupiter Research says that the market for avocado-farming software like we make will be $10 billion by 2010.” What you want to do is catalyze fantasy: that is, enable the reader to make her own mental calculation that this market is big.
9. Write deliberate, act emergent. This means that when you write your plan, you act as if you know exactly what you're going to do. You are deliberate. You're probably wrong, but you take your best shot. However, writing deliberate doesn't mean that you adhere to the plan in the face of new information and new opportunities. As you execute the plan, you act emergent--that is, you are flexible and fast moving: changing as you learn more and more about the market.

"Wicked problem" is a phrase used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.

1. Groups can arise from almost nothing
2. Initiation rites improve group evaluations
3. Groups breed conformity
4. Learn the ropes or be ostracised
5. You become your job
6. Leaders gain trust by conforming
7. Groups can improve performance...
8. ...but people will loaf
9. The grapevine is 80% accurate
10. Groups breed competition

Read more at spring.org.uk

Berteig Consulting's Learning Manifesto, The Purpose of OpenAgile:

To create an environment in which people are free to express their true nature and capacities as human beings to contribute to the betterment of their organization. Learning is the key to productivity, progress and success. The learning we want is:

• Systematic vs. Ad Hoc 
• Deep vs. Shallow 
• Continuous vs. Sporadic 
• Applied vs. Theoretical 
• Shared vs. Hoarded

And in order to do learning with these qualities, we recognize that Truthfulness is the foundation.

"Collective intelligence applications depend on managing,
understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated
data in real time. The "subsystems" of the emerging internet operating
system are increasingly data subsystems: location, identity (of
people, products, and places), and the skeins of meaning that tie them
together. This leads to new levers of competitive advantage: Data is
the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications."

"The new direction for the Web, its collision course with the physical
world, opens enormous new possibilities for business, and enormous new
possibilities to make a difference on the world’s most pressing
problems... When we started the Web 2.0 events, we stated that "the
Web is a platform." Since then, thousands of businesses and millions
of lives have been changed by the products and services built on that
platform. But 2009 marks a pivot point in the history of the Web. It’s
time to leverage the true power of the platform we’ve built. The Web
is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world."

http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194