This is the bookshelf at the Wikimedia Foundation's office in San Francisco (1)
If you want to write for Wikipedia
Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, by John Broughton
How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It, by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews and Ben Yates
If you want to understand why Wikipedia matters
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia, by Joseph Reagle
About leadership and organizational culture
The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management, by Jerry B. Harvey Very useful parables on management. Includes a great story about Captain Kohei Asoh, a Japan Airlines pilot who in 1968 landed a DC-8 in the San Francisco Bay and afterwards famously told investigators that he had just “fucked up” – an admission Harvey popularized as the Asoh defense, and used to celebrate the importance of truth-telling, mistake-revealing, and mistake-forgiving.
Organizational Culture and Leadership, by Edgar Schein Back in 1966, Edgar Schein invented the phrase corporate culture. This is the definitive guide to understanding and managing the culture of an organization.
Parkinson’s Law and other Studies in Administration, by C. Northcote Parkinson From 1957, Parkinson’s Law is best-known for the essay “High Finance or the Point of Vanishing Interest,” AKA the bikeshed essay. In 1999 Poul-Henning Kamp famously said on a FreeBSD mailing list that “I wish we could reduce the amount of noise in our lists and I wish we could let people build a bike shed every so often, and I don’t really care what colour they paint it.”
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams and Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, by Tom DeMarco
Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment, by Jamie Showkeir and Maren Showkeir, with a foreword by Margaret J. Wheatley
Other
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander
High Conflict People in Legal Disputes, by William A. Eddy
Books About Quakers [2]
Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Society of Friends, Michael J. Sheeran
The Governance Handbook for Friends Schools, Irene McHenry and Ginny Christensen
Decisions by Consensus: A Study of the Quaker Method, Glenn Bartoo
Beyond Dilemmas: Quakers Look at Life, S.B. Laughlin
The Quaker Meeting For Business, Douglas Steere
Before Business Begins: Notes for Recording Clerks, William Braasch Watson
Handbook for the Presiding Clerk, David Stanfield
Clearness Committees and their Use in Personal Discernment, Jan Hoffman
Creative Listening: Quaker Dialogue, Claremont Monthly Meeting
Dealing with Difficult Behavior in a Meeting for Worship: Meeting The Needs Of The Many While Responding To The Needs Of The Few, the Ministry and Nurture Committee of Friends General Conference
Fostering Vital Friends Meetings: A Handbook For Working With Quaker Meetings, Jan Greene and Marty Walton
[1] Photograph taken by James T. Owen using a Nexus One at the Wikimedia Foundation office in San Francisco, November 16 2010. CC-BY-SA; it’s also here. I added it to this page to placate Gerard Meijssen, a great Wikimedian who I believe is making fun of me in this post. In case you’re curious, it was Daniel Phelps who categorized the books under the Dewey Decimal system. I did the same once with my home library, so I was both charmed and horrified to watch that happen.
[2] I’m not a Quaker; I just find their consensus decisionmaking practices interesting.
In the ’80s, I was a member of Movement for a New Society. This organization grew out of A Quaker Action Group, and was a major influence on social change organizations in promoting the use of Quaker-oriented Gandhian non-violence, and, in particular, the use of consensus in decision-making. The organization no longer exists, but many of the books and manuals they wrote about consensus are still available in some form, although the books are out of print. I found two of them (“Meeting Facilitation — The No-Magic Method” and “Consensus and Group Process Handbook”) at this website: . If you want me to see if I can dig up more resources along these lines, let me know.
BTW, I’m sending this from the DC Hack-a-Ton. Thanks to MediaWiki for making this happen!
Thanks for those links, Paul — The Consensus and Nonviolent Process Handbook and this page on meeting facilitation look really good. I think I will try, at the next board meeting, asking for someone to volunteer to be “Vibeswatcher,” LOL.
Hope the hackathon’s going great :-)
Sue, nice collection! Another favorite listing of books, of course, are the Harvard Classics. The hard part is getting through all of them!
P.S. Could you pass on a very important message to Jimmy Wales? Tell him that anytime he puts a picture on Wikipedia for fundraising, in the future, to SMILE! :)
thanks for sharing ….its wonderful
Interesting collection, Sue. I am on a mission to find and to read those books.
Also, I found this article about you: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/154/librarian-to-the-world.html?page=0%2C3
You are my hero.
Thanks!
Janna