At OSCON this year, Jono Bacon, argued that we are entering a era of renaissance in open source community management – that increasingly we don’t just have to share stories but that repeatable, scientific approaches are increasingly available to us. In short, the art of community management is shifting to a science.

With an enormous debt to Jono, I contend we are already there. Indeed the tools for enable a science of community management have existed for at least 5 years. All that is needed is an effort to implement them.

A few weeks ago the organizers of DjangoCon were kind enough to invite me to give the keynote at their conference in Portland and I made these ideas the centerpiece of my talk.

Embedded below is the result: a talk that that starts slowly, but that grew with passion and engagement as it progressed. I really want to thank the audience for the excellent Q&A and for engaging with me and the ideas as much as they did. As someone from outside their community, I’m grateful.

My hope in the next few weeks is to write this talk up in a series of blog posts or something more significant, and, hopefully, to redo this video in slideshare (although I’m going to have to get my hands on the audio of this). I’ll also be giving a version of this talk at the Drupal Pacific Northwest Summit in a few weeks. Feedback, as always, is not only welcome, but gratefully received. None of this happens in a vacuum, it is always your insights that help me get better, smarter and more on target.

Big thanks to Dierderik Van Liere and Lauren Bacon for inspiration and help as well as Mike Beltzner, Daniel Einspanjer, David Ascher and Dan Mosedale (among many others) at Mozilla who’ve been supportive and a big assistance.

In the meantime, I hope this is enjoyable, challenging and spurs good thoughts.