Engineering Driven vs. Community Driven (was Re: Ugliness)

[steve]

Ya thanks Ian, Lowell is on travel and hopefully after he gets back we can
figure out how to construct a viable dialogue  on the issue. I think
tapping his experience is very important.

One day in a santa clara hotel Sean, will and I are sitting there
and Will shows me these great YouTube Openmoko commercials. Made by
a community member. And a bomb went off in my head. Open marketing!
So, we placed the marketing assets under creative commons. And we will
go beyond that to involve everybody as practicable. But when BusinessWeek
calls and wants to talk to somebody, I cannot say, wait, let me see
what everybody else thinks, and can we arrange a con call with 1M people.
It's hard enough getting a press release out with 3 people arguing over
words, much less 1M. So, there will be times I speak for the community
without their explicit permission. And beg forgiveness when I tread on my
own private parts.

Roadmap is also difficult and let me explain why.  If you ask people what
they want, they will ask for the moon and naked dancing girls AND free beer.
A noble goal. Now you lay a schedule and cost on that. You can have the moon
in two years and it will cost you 699. per moon unit.
  
So, people can share their wish list. It will go into the mix. But
the final product is not the union of all wish lists. namely, free beer is
out. So, we look at the range of possible configurations. We weigh what it
costs, we weigh the schedule, we estimate the ROI based on marketing
estimates.

 Not a lot of this is open, yet. My request to the community. Work with us.
Don't ask for free beer, because we will not ship it.



 

-----Original Message-----
From: community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org
[mailto:community-bounces at lists.openmoko.org] On Behalf Of Ian Darwin
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2008 5:26 PM
To: List for Openmoko community discussion
Subject: Re: Engineering Driven vs. Community Driven (was Re: Ugliness)

Ryan Prior wrote:
> A synopsis:
> 
> Lowell: "Let's make this project community-driven."
> Steve: "Please talk to me about it privately."
> 
> WTF?

Perhaps you didn't read this part:
> 
>      I'd rather take this offline with you, since the main focus here
[meaning, on this discussion list, at this time]
>     and now is how to get the product that
>     is [already] built into people's hands.

 >     Then you can feed that back to people, agreeing or
 >     disagreeing as you see fit.

Stop looking for conspiracies - there aren't any here.

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