Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 11:39 AM, William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com> wrote:

Hi Karen,

I think these are good suggestions. But I think it would be a mistake to leave this critical responsibility to a committee of volunteers. One of the many challenges we face is that our voice and message have been too inconsistent - too infrequently heard. Heard too late. Lacking authority. In want of good taste. And dealing with this is taking a huge toll on our ability to attract and retain contributors. Something needs to be done.

I propose that we hire or appoint a full time director of marketing.

Let me add one other position.  We need to hire another sysadmin person.  Along the same community support, we need to also be able to have the infrastructure to support coming out with daily builds for the community to test out and give feedback on the new designs that come out.  Bug testing and performance testing as well so that we have a quality product.  If we are serious about doing GNOME OS we are going to need to upgrade our infrastructure.  We will need to do fund raising to be able get the right hardware and the right person to manage it.

Regarding the community management, I think it will be challenging to find such a person in the near term.  Going with the a team of volunteers who are trained to do this will at least let us work out what changes we need to make internally and externally.

Certain changes will need to be talked over with both the release team and the marketing or community management team.  Currently, marketing team is just a bolted on team in GNOME.  So, I think to realize your goals below we need to change how we do things internally.

It'll be a tough slog, people don't think about community outreach.  We're primarily a technical project and still have a lot of the hacker culture and doing this kind of stuff is against it.  Then again, nobody ever done a designed focused open source project either, have we? :-)

With the following responsibilities:

 * Organize and work with a team of "advocates"
 * Grok and channel the voice of the project rather than impose a separate agenda
 * Consult with the design, development, testing, and documentation teams
 * Help us clearly and effectively communicate our goals and objectives
 * Organize the creation of press releases / release notes
 * Blog regularly about ongoing initiatives and progress
 * Be a beacon of light to counter the darkness
 * Help us communicate proactively instead of reactively
 * Educate misinformed journalists
 * Be a point of contact for external parties that want information
 * Reduce the burden on volunteers
 * Delegate the above responsibilities

The one thing I wanted to do with the advocates as you call them is to really go onto blogs and popular social media places and actually address people who complain.  I think this works and I know I have made some in-roads using this approach.  It's amazing how a simply listening changes a person's perspective on GNOME.  There are of course some people who are completely deranged but in general, I believe people turned positive. At the very least their last interaction with us was pleasant and might be willing to look at GNOME again later.

If nothing else, it is clear that we are failing to perform these critical duties. We are paying a dear price for it. I think we need to admit we need professional help - a point I'm sure even our harshest critics will agree with.

This is good to hear.  I hope others also are in agreement.  Acknowledging we have an issue is a good first step to solving it.

sri

Jon

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Karen Sandler <karen gnome org> wrote:

On Wed, November 14, 2012 8:40 am, Bastien Nocera wrote:

> - And "discontent". Well, I think that I have reasonable doubts to think
> that those community managers wouldn't be able to carry the message of
> developers truthfully if said developers aren't being talked to.

I think it's a fair point to raise issues of quality control for this
committee. One of the things I think we should start with for this
initiative is the creation of GNOME talking points/FAQ type of document.
The new team could do this by working with the release team, the board and
others in the community who would like to contribute. I think some of the
conversation we're having in other threads on this list are a good start
for that too. By going through that process, we'd be able to train the
volunteers and provide material to work from for the individuals to use in
formulating their own responses (so not a cut and paste document, but a
formulation of key goals, ideas and decisions). We could also create
infrastructure to help them out, like an IRC channel and private mailing
list where posts can be vetted.

We'd also need to set up mechanisms for communication so that developers
can be consulted. In the end, I think this could wind up being a lot
easier for our core developers, who seem to be often put on the spot to
defend their work. Having a team that these developers can talk to and
count on to repeatedly respond on behalf of the project seems to me like a
great way to preserve those people's time. Are there other ways we could
improve this side of the conversation?

karen

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