July 28th, 2016

Jono Bacon on Life After (and Before) GitHub

It caused a bit of a splash in May when Jono Bacon abruptly left GitHub after serving as community manager for only six months. As we predicted at the time, he’s landed on his feet.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

Do you want to know what it takes to be a professional community manager? This interview will show you the kind of personality that does well at it, and how Jono Bacon, one of the world’s finest community managers, discovered Linux and later found his way into community management.

Bacon is world-famous as the long-time community manager for Ubuntu. He was so good, I sometimes think his mother sang “you’ll be a community manager by and by” to him when he was a baby. In 2014 he went to XPRIZE, not a FOSS company, but important nevertheless. From there he dove back into FOSS as community manager for GitHub.

Now Bacon is a freelance, self-employed community manager. One of his major clients is HackerOne, whose CEO is Bacon’s and my mutual friend Mårten Mickos. But HackerOne is far from his only client. In the interview he says he recently got back from visiting a client in China, and that he has more work then he can handle.

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