A familiar face to open source conference goers, Jono Bacon has left his post as director of community at GitHub after only six months.
Jono Bacon is no longer the director of community at GitHub. We wouldn’t fret for him too much. Something tells us he’ll land on his feet.
The only thing we know for sure right now is that there seems to be a bit of a shake-up going on at the popular code repository that he’s left behind. He made the announcement Monday in a post on his blog which leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
“Friday was my last day as a hubber,” he wrote, “and I wanted to share a few words about why I have decided to move on.”
“Like any growing organization…, GitHub will from time to time need to make adjustments in strategy and organization. One component in some recent adjustments sadly resulted in the Director of Community role going away.”
According to Bacon, he leaves on good terms with his former employer, without any apparent ill will.
“Unfortunately, I ultimately didn’t feel they matched my passion and skills for building powerful, productive, engaging communities, as I mentioned above. As such, I decided it was time to part ways with GitHub.”
Bacon, a Brit by birth who now calls California home, and the author of “The Art of Community” and other books, has changed jobs often in his career. After stints with KDE and OpenAdvantage, he ended up serving as the Ubuntu community manager for Canonical from 2005-2014 before moving for an eighteen month stint at XPrize as the senior director of community. He began working for GitHub in November.
In addition to his community development work and writing books, he’s also a fairly prolific journalist, and has penned articles for “Linux User and Developer,” “Linux Format,” “Linux Magazine,” “MacTech,” “MacFormat” and “PC Plus.” He’s also a frequent speaker at open source conferences.
One rumor FOSS Force has heard puts him on his way back to Canonical. In his blog post, Bacon hints that he has some plans, “I have a few things in the pipeline that I am not quite ready to share yet, so stay tuned and I will share this soon.”
Editor’s note: Article was updated May 25, 2016 at 11:20 p.m. EDT to correct length of Juno Bacon’s employment with XPrize.
Thanks for the kind piece. One clarification: I was at XPRIZE for longer than five months…just over a year and a half.
@Jono My apologies and thanks for the heads up. The article has been corrected.
Jono Bacon is what is known in the world of politics as a “community organizer”.
Remember when Palin was asked about the difference between being a ‘community organizer” (Obama) and mayor of a city (her), she responded that the only difference was that a mayoralty involved doing real work.
I’m not surprised that there’s no fit in any organization where real work is required.
@Jimmike That may or may not be. But using insight supplied by Sarah Palin doesn’t help boost your point, IMHO.
Yes . . . “quiting” the real job of Govn’r of Alaska to be a “talking head” at Fox. 100% respect out the window.g
Was it a case of GitHubris?
KDE Wants you Back!