Re: community managers

[Seif Lotfy <seif lotfy com>]

Hello,

First I love the idea of a community team. KDE already has such a team with a good mission (http://ev.kde.org/workinggroups/cwg.php).I think studying their history and experience would be beneficial to the community team.

After discussing this Lydia from KDE, it looks more like a "Public Relations" team more than a "Community Management" team. Both do have some common tasks. I think a Community team should encompass a PR team.

Agreed. We have a problem communicating our vision internally and externally.

Internally it seems like not all of us are on the same page, e.g: "theming will damage our brand". Or systemd dependencies etc. Do all "high profile" GNOME contributors agree on this? 

Before communicating to the outside world that "XYZ" is a fact we need to at least agree on it internally. Taking the liberties with ones own modules without general consensus inside the community leads to friction and arguments. This is something that a community team should work on, make people inside the community get along, reduce friction.

As a community team another mission would be working on communication between devs, on mailing lists and bugs. Damage caused by snarky, arrogant or dismissive remarks should be controlled and positive communication efforts have to promoted and praised.

Just my 2 cents

Cheers

Seif

 

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Dave Neary <dneary gnome org> wrote:

Hi,

On 11/13/2012 06:53 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

As a project, we are having trouble communicating our vision because
everything gets lost in a sea of vitriol due to past actions or
perceived actions.  For instance, removing fallback is seen as yet again
the GNOME project is removing a feature instead of an act of maintenance
and sustainability.

I think that as a project, we have had trouble communicating our vision, because as a project we are not sure what it is. There is a part of the project that has a very clear idea of their vision, but that vision has either not been clearly expressed, or what has been expressed has not got clear support from the community of contributors in the project. For instance, the insistence that theming will damage our brand, or that Cinnamon is not GNOME 3, has led to missed opportunities for the GNOME project, and has not got grass roots support among the GNOME community (and I'm not talking about users here, I'm talking about contributors - developers, translators, user group co-ordinators, and marketers). 

After all, GNOME design doesn't have any authority but is able to
convince maintainers that doing their approach is best for their
application.

I disagree with your analogy.

I'm envisioning a team of 10 volunteers.  10 volunteers who start out as
community managers and then hopefully will be interested in doing other
things within the project.

I currently have four as of right now.  Need to recruit six more!

Sounds like a plan, and we certainly need to do something to stop the rot.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary, Lyon, France
Email: dneary gnome org
Jabber: nearyd gmail com
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