What should a community manager do?

Joel Newkirk freerunner at newkirk.us
Sat Oct 11 23:37:53 CEST 2008


On Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:35:12 +1030, Rod Whitby <rod at whitby.id.au> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> The community will have both (and often a single person will be one or
> the other depending on what type of day they are having in real life),
> but you really do need areas in the community (like a developers mailing
> list) where the "user" mindset is simply not acceptable.  To do this
> without disrepecting your users, you also need areas where the "user"
> mindset is fully accepted and responded to with excellent support.

There's also a distinctly grey area that might be exemplified by
'application developer' - someone who develops software for the platform,
but expects the underlying infrastructure to be stable and complete, and
instability or incompleteness to be resolved 'upstream' at OM, or by
whomever has produced the distribution of their choice.  Effectively they
are of the 'user mindset' with regard to the core system (both kernelspace
and core functionality in userspace), but of the 'developer mindset' with
regard to everything sitting on top of it. (general userspace)

WRT your final point, we already have the 'Support' mailinglist - my
impression is that the intent of that list (not necessarily the actual
usage though) is as a place for the 'user' to go when seeking answers and
fixes, rather than seeking to involve themselves in the actual quest for
those answers and fixes.

j





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