Creating and growing a community is an art, but there are known best practices. From the 2010 O'Reilly MySQL Conference, Jono Bacon, Community Manager for Ubuntu, tells about his experiences with the Ubuntu community and some of the lessons he has learned about how to make a technical community work.

There are two important community-related jobs: evangelists who promote a project to users, and community managers that coordinate with the engineers who write software. Evangelists are cheerleaders that spread the word and create mindshare. Community managers need people skills and organizational skills to help create teams, enable communication, and create an environment of collaboration. Being an effective community manager is much more about motivating people to produce good work than being someone who has the loudest podium to speak from.