Re: Pre-release marketing and community management [Was: getting www.gnome3.org]

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

Hi Will,

On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 4:37 AM, will kahn-greene <willg bluesock org> wrote:

On 01/06/2011 08:00 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
>
> I'm not really that worn down.  If you are, you're emotionally investing too
> much into it.

I haven't said much during this exchange, but this response surprised
me.  Developers getting worn down by the hate is a real thing.  It's so
not fair to say that developers who get worn down are too emotionally
invested or are otherwise doing it wrong.

My comment was in response to Dave.  Neither of us are developers but both of us are doing non-technical things.  The original problem statement was that exactly as you describe that developers can be worn out by hate.  But I was talking about community people like myself should not get worn down by hate precisely because we're approaching community management from a different perspective.

We have this problem with Miro right now where we've got a tiny staff of
developers and no customer relations kind of person.  Thus developers
like me end up sifting through the hate.  We've been discussing this
problem on our mailing list and it's probably the case all the devs are
going to stop reading the forums.  This got sent out this morning and
really summed up the whole problem for us:

Yes, this is a real issue and you need non-developer types who can help you in community management.  There are a lot of people who have a sense of entitlement and sometimes that must be approached with a firm hand.  The goal is to take those people and see if we can make them useful contributors in other ways.  Bring them into your development cycle as triage, marketing and whatever.

  

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/01/three-reasons-creators-should-never.html

This isn't anything new.  This is not a "developers who feel worn down
are deficient" problem.  This is a "there needs to be someone in
between" problem.

Developers being worn down is a symptom of a problem of a lack of communications.

 

My question is one of ignorance: does the GNOME community have a team of
people who stand between the developers and the various forums?

Not traditionally.  In a normal cycle we don't generally need to do much community management.  This is likely because Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distros are managing the desktop experience.  But with GNOME 3.0 we are sort of in a place where I and some others believe that community management is required in the short term.  We'll probably need to do it for a couple of releases.

If you're interested in community management there are plenty of blog posts on the subject.  I think Jono himself wrote up a post on it on Planet GNOME.  You probably can engage Jono in a conversation on IRC or if you can grab him at a conference he's pretty approachable.

Your link makes a good argument against forums which I had brought up in this thread.

sri