This is the third and the last part in the series of posts discussing the Openmoko community. The first post discussed the status of the community. The second post was the ‘wishlist’ from some community members to Openmoko and this third will discuss one of the possible solutions to improve communication. Make sure you have read the previous posts before reading this.
The comments without the e-mail addresses are from community mailing list, the rest from the comments of my previous post. Remember, these are only parts from the messages so please check the original posts for more details!
Steve Mosher <steve@xxxxx> Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 5:37 AM
I had a long chat with Sean today. We both read the community list daily and our number one topic of conversation was the “Lost community” thread. Sean asked me what I thought of having a community manager. ( he was reading my mind again)I have my ideas about what a community manager would do to organize and mobilize, But before I put those ideas down, I’d like to throw it open to the community. Question: what functions do you see a community manager performing. Write his job spec. ( hint hint)
I’m really happy if my posts (with comments from others!) have brought this idea to you. If not to make it come true right now at least it’s made you have a good look at the community. That’s what I wanted!
Steve Mosher <steve@xxxxx> Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 12:19 AM
The goal isnt to make everyone happy. there is not enough free beer for that. the goal is to optimize the value of the community. Looking for ideas. “There’s no way” is an acceptable answer, in the end, after exploring ideas. But Steves rule for brainstorming is that during the
brainstorming part, NO is not allowed. get the ideas out. get them on the table. then evaluate and toss out the bad ideas. It a difficult process to suspend judgement during the brainstorming session, but its vital to the process. Plenty of time for No’s.The complaint about incomplete distros was what got me thinking. I dont see a community manager as a solution to that. basically I read the article he pointed at, and it took me down an entirely different path. Tangent Man! Now the distro question obviously plays back into it. In
what way? Dunno yet. If I knew or had made a decision i would post a job spec. But I dont know and havent made a decision, so I throw it out to the community for feedback. Yours is always welcome and taken to heart.Steve Mosher <steve@xxxxx> Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 10:24 PM
Ristro’s concerns trigger me to thing about ALL the ways the community can help. And that triggered me to think about optimizing that effort.
Steve, you’re the man. You could have not reacted better! You listened to the community, took an idea there and give it back to the community to play with to see if there’s support and what are the requirements. Well done, this makes me feel the community is respected!
Stroller <stroller@xxxxx> Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:06 AM
IMO a “community manager” would just be a distraction from Openmoko’s real business. You should be concentrating on the hardware, and if you’re employing an additional member of staff then make it a kernel programmer, so that your hardware runs more smoothly for the distros that evolve around it. Or get FSO complete sooner, so that (again) all the distros benefit.
Right.. You just can’t make everybody happy.. I wouldn’t either mind a new kernel developer at Openmoko to unlock all the hidden power of Freerunner.
I believe that the ultimate strategy of an open source company is to outsource the work (design, development, testing, marketing) to the community and have pay only people who are essential to manage the community and convert the community product into money. Of course it is really difficult (impossible) to get to this point so Openmoko needs developers of their own to guarantee development happens.
My feeling is that the openmoko community is not working on full speed and it could be used to do a lot more in the future. Investing in a good community manager would unleash the community to do a better job than a single full time (kernel) developer would do. But that’s just me. I believe that if one is able to make people work together in an efficient way, miracles can happen. And anyway the weekly engineering news tell that there are developer positions open all the time.
Minh Ha Duong <haduong@xxxxx> Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 10:48 AM
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates/October_3rd%2C_2008
This is great – aggregated community status information. Well done Minh!
David Roetzel <david@xxxxx> Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 11:56 AM
how about that:* Work with Openmoko Inc. to flesh out a project structure and roadmap that encourages community participation
* Work with Openmoko Inc. to enhance collaboration with the community
* Work out a structure for the community (eg. Ubuntu-style teams)
* Work with individual community members to lower the bar for them to contribute to Openmoko
* Incentivize community participation (eg. Summer of code)
* Enhance communication between Openmoko Inc. and the community
* Enhance communication between Openmoko and other free software projects
* Organize Openmoko presences at community events, conferences etc.Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager, seems to be making a good job, at least I have found the Ubuntu community to be very passionate yet helpful and friendly. Jono regularly speaks about his job and its challenges. I found his LCA 2007 talk quite interesting.
I am not convinced that a community manager is strictly necessary for Openmoko, but having one would surely be helpful.
Alex Osborne <ato@xxxxx> Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:11 AM
You can’t have leadership without first a way to communicate effectively. In my opinion, the wiki is being covered pretty well now and is becoming a really good _reference_. So what is missing?News! News! News! The engineering updates are excellent once you’ve discovered them. The community updates by Steve leading up to the release of the FreeRunner were also good.
Make sure you read Alex’s excellent post with analysis about news of some large communities!! I so much agree that having information moving faster would solve some issues: people would know what’s happening, they would know better where to help, where the developer resources are used and so on.
Rod Whitby <rod@xxxxxxxx> Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 8:48 AM
I’ll answer this from the point of view of a “development community”
manager. I think you already have a fine “end-user community” manager
in Michael Shiloh.A development community manager must have the number one priority of
embracing all the disparate developers working on the Openmoko platform,
and being responsible for “bringing them into the fold”
Read Rod’s full post on the mailing list it has some great points that all OSS projects should follow. I really mean, read it – it’s almost like a part of this post!
I’ve also noticed Michael Shiloh doing some work for the community. I haven’t seen his job description but I’ve seen him encouraging people to add their hacks from the mailing list to the wiki and that he’s been doing some wiki cleaning and stuff. If he really is responsible for the community I’d hope you clearly communicated this so that community knows their point of contact.
Rod Whitby <rod@xxxxxx> Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 12:05 AM
Note that I make no distinction between code, doco, bug reports, marketing material, fonts, UI elements, wiki pages, etc when talking about developers.Anyone who has the mindset of “this is broken, how can I fix it?” is a developer.
Anyone who has the mindset of “this is broken, I expect it to be fixed by someone else right now!” is a user.
Note that both needs (support of users and embracing of developers) do need to be met for a well functioning community. But I don’t believe a single person can do the job of meeting both those needs.
The needs of both mindsets need to be met! Personally I think that there’s a lot one person can do to support both mindsets. And the manager doesn’t have to do of course it doesn’t have to be just one who does it all, he can try to create a team to work with the stuff with him.
Lorn Potter <lpotter@xxxxxxx> Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 1:57 AM
Rod Whitby wrote:
> I’m sorry, but I don’t believe one single community manager can cross
> the divide between the “developer” and “user” mindsets that I spoke
> about in my reply to your earlier post.I disagree. I have been doing exactly that for the last 5 years. Trying
to anyway. I believe a community manager can only be _one_ person.Kostis Anagnostopoulos <ankostis@xxxxx> Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 12:19 PM
- We do not need a PR Manager to *insualte* the community from the enginners.
- We need an Editor to ease communications among those 2 groups.
Minh Ha Duong <haduong@xxxxx> Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:07 AM
I am most curious to see what Lorn and Michael come up with. I have never seen
such a job spec, but someone who:- Subscribes and read all mailing lists, writes and disseminates community updates.
- Has root on the community-facings servers, to bring immediate benefits like fixing the repeated messages in mailing lists, google search mediawiki extentions, do the community-repository interface.
- Gardens and grows the translation teams and local user groups system.
When I first read about the Community Manager position I, like David Roetzel thought of Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager working for Canonical. Here’s something to help you understand what might be required from a community manager and where to start when working with the community:
The Ubuntu Community Manager opening is “uniquely Ubuntu” in that it brings together professional management with community integration. This job has been created to help the huge Ubuntu community gain traction, creating structure where appropriate, identifying the folks who are making the best and most consistent contributions and empowering them to get more of their visions, ideas and aspirations delivered as part of Ubuntu – release by release.
(http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/47)
Jono Bacon tells about his areas of focus:
- Ensuring the wheels of the community are well oiled, and the different teams (Documentation, Art, LoCo, Marketing, Press, Accessibility etc.) can effectively work together, resolve conflict, source resources and more.
- Refine and explore methods to make the Ubuntu community as approachable as possible. I want to ensure potential contributors can get started quickly and know when, where and how to get involved easily.
- Develop processes and practises to ensure we get the most out of contributor time. Many contributors only have limited time they can dedicate to a project – we want to make sure they get the most out of that time and there are as few obstacles and red tape in the way. Happy contributors get things done and achieve doable goals – lets make this rock even more.
- To foster innovation at every level. We have so much potential to think outside the box, develop better ways of working together and new ways of delivering in each of the different teams.
- Making the Ubuntu community as inclusive as possible. The ever-growing Ubuntu community spreads across many countries, cultures and communication mediums – lets make sure that we always retain community feel and spirit.
- Measure and explore patterns in the community so we can understand it better and ensure all aspects of the community get the attention they need.
- source: http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=737
Articles Jono has written about running a community: http://www.jonobacon.org/?page_id=774#26
Then something what Jono writes after some years with community management experience:
Don’t get me wrong, community is very much a soft science. It is about relationships, it is about connections, and most importantly it is about trust. When there are no relationships, no connections and no trust, community managers tend to start looking for jobs as taxi drivers.
A soft science though does not mean though that there is an excuse to just assume the world is a big analogue blur that we can only measure and assess by licking a finger and lifting it to the breeze. A key trick in being an effective community leader is to discover the mechanics of your community, and understand how to assess and measure them. (http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1284)
OK, although I like Ubuntu and these are from the Ubuntu community manager I’m sure that by reading these (and if more interested, all the material behind the links) one easily sees how important it is to pay attention to the community, both users and developers. I don’t have much experience but I think that at the best community equals communication, innovation, learning, rapid development and excitement. It’s easy to get on and one can also leave the community still being happy and not disappointed. But on most cases it needs some determined action to take the community to that direction, it’s not likely to ‘just happen’. Community manager can enable the community to develop to an efficient, skillful and innovative group of people who work free for you producing high quality software, marketing material, more customers and so on.
Thanks for everybody who posted their valuable thoughts!
My two cents. While waiting for a response from Openmoko and the community (yes, you!) I’ll have a look at 2008.9.
NOTE: The quoted texts are copyrighted by the original authors and therefore not covered by the licence this blog uses!
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