Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

The wrong idea of course is that people think we're just removing features for no apparent reason even though for instance fallback mode was never guarantee.  We need to correct those misconceptions.

Having a good relationship with the general public is more important now than it was in the past thanks to social media.  For example, with Ubuntu (who holds the largest share of users right now), GNOME is no longer the default and so it takes a conscious effort to change to GNOME.  If they do the research, I don't want them to see a pile of ridiculous blog postings that aren't challenged by calm and simple rhetoric.

Regarding, Emily's post.  You need to look at the overall message there.  Not everyone is on the same page, and the fact that we are having this discussion with other people who clearly have the same concerns is indicative that we do have a problem.  If you think there is no problem, we an drop this whole thing.

Community enthusiasts won't go out there using the 'royal we' without some training.  This stuff isn't easy, and it is important that our volunteers understand how to engage in both the GNOME community and the community at large.  They will need training on GNOME's vision and purpose.  That means, release team, designers, and relevant parties will need to help these volunteers in understanding it before going out there and speaking in our name.  I'm having Karen be in charge of us.

The end goal is to reduce the signal to noise ratio and get real feedback without hyperbole and let developers and designers be able to produce awesome stuff without feeling buried in undue negativity.  The only thing I ask in return is that you consider the feedback that is being provided to you.  If the feedback is negative, help us engage with the community with the right approach.  If the feedback is positive, then I hope you will take that as encourage and motivation to keep doing it.

sri

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 2:38 AM, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:

Hey Sri,

On Tue, 2012-11-13 at 16:07 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
>
> I'm looking for some charismatic, happy GNOME folks who can help
> engage with our community.
>
> We've had a bad run of late with a lot of folks getting the wrong idea
> of what we're trying to do.

Which is?

> I'm looking for some talented folks who can help us engage with the
> press, on blogs, on mailing lists and explain our vision.

I hope it's slightly better handled than Emily last 2 posts, which
managed to say that the removal of fallback was badly communicated (!)
without details of what was done wrong, and used a blog post by a troll
to make false assertions about GTK+ 3.x's API stability.

You might want to vouch for your community managers before you let them
loose...