Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Andrew Cowie <andrew operationaldynamics com> wrote:

On Wed, 2012-11-14 at 11:50 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:

> Sheesh.

Seems an over-reaction, Dave. We've had some abysmal press lately, and I
agree with Bastien; a number of the things generating headlines have
little to do with facts or with what people who are "in" GNOME are
actually doing. But we still look bad all the same.

This is precisely why you want someone to just engage and state the facts.
 

I'm not sure how creating a "community manager" position is going to
change that. Ubuntu has a community manager. The job description seems
to be slavishly saying how great everything is. Admittedly, that *is*
PR, but I ended up unsubscribing/unfollowing/uncircling him from all my
networks because the banging-the-drum was incessant.

I'm not really trying to do PR here.  I'm trying to address certain misconceptions that come about constantly every time a GNOME is brought up in a post.  There aren't enough positive reactions from users to counterbalance.

As I said, I've been doing this since 3.0, engaging members of our community from Linus on down to some random poster on G+.  When you do engage you do create a positive outcome.  Even if they don't agree with you in the end and you part ways they will leave at least respectful.  Tha'ts good enough for me.

The idea here is not to be GNOME rah rah rah.  If you don't agree with where it is going, then that's fine.  But I won't stand to hear the standard FUD about removing features or that GNOME developers are taking over and doing things over the community.  It's all a bunch of crap.  You have to address it before it becomes common wisdom.
 

So how can we communicate effectively without making it seem we're being
slavish?

It's simple, you trust that the path you're going on is the right one and then explain, sometime ad nauseum what we're trying to do.  Ask them to give it a chance.  If you still don't like it then ask them what they didn't like about it.  If you have a large number of people saying the same thing then maybe there is something we need to look at.  If it is because it is some kind of ego trip or whatever then I'll ignore it.  I've done this enough times to figure out what is what.

sri

AfC
Sydney

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