On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new book review from Keith Casey covering the Karl Fogel book Producing Open Source Software, a guide to organizing and running a successful open source project and its community.

By the time I finished the book a few months later, it rocked my professional world and I couldn't wait to jump into the community fully and completely. To be clear, Karl's book is about the difficulties and challenges of building a team to build a project, but almost all of it is relevant in the building communities in general...

He goes through some of the topics mentioned in the book and highlights three different themes that stood out to him - Political and Social Structure, Communication and one of the most difficult, Managing Volunteers.

So overall, almost every single idea struck me as both blindingly obvious and often missed. And the single best part about this entire book... about 90% of it applies to any project or technical community. Yes, I don't care if you're working on an Open Source project, an internal project, or a commercial shrink-wrapped application. You can use almost any idea from this book and apply it immediately.