02:59:28 pm, Categories: Computers and Internet, Open Source, 1035 words Posted by: Joseph A. di Paolantonio
Community Development: Business Development for the 21st Century
Panel:
Danese objects to the term "Community Manager" as one never really manages the community. Intel is a huge contributor and user of open source. And you might never know this in that Intel wisely separates the open source projects from the corporate presence.
Andy feels that SugarCRM does a pretty good job at garnering contributions; they also reach out to the community to assure that design decisions are in accord with what the community needs. The community acts as a force modifier for the development team. Andy is in charge of the community, the Sugar Exchange, and the online training for commercial customers.
Dawn at Jive Software, which is mostly proprietary, has a slightly different dynamic, and mostly developer relations. On the one hand they have the completely open source Ignite, which is a fully community driven project. On the other hand, the proprietary Jive software, does provide the source code to customers for modifications, and supporting those developers if is very important.
Chris, at Google, needs in some ways, to address all humanity on the web.
Once upon, Raven was a web master, a mostly defunct title now. Where is the concept of "community manager" going, and where should it report in the organization? NOT MARKETING. SugarCRM split it off into a totally different organization, outside the normal corporate structure.
Many feels that there needs to be a strong community manager; is this true. Chris feels this is really dependent upon the type of project. Danese looks towards Apache, which is a federation of developers; projects may need a strong community leader at the start, such as Linus for Linux, but there may be less of a need once the project matures and the community grows. Dawn goes along with this in general. Andy likes the idea of a facilitator better.
One idea is going beyond development communities and getting the community involved in all aspects of the business. Dawn had brought this up at 451 Group's Monday Night event, and she feels that this is very important to the growth of a proejct; many communities have huge nationalization groups. Danese looked at CVS, subversion, and the newer tools like GIT which are not hierarchical.
How to get customers involved in the community?
Chris: make it easy and don't force developers to upgrade in response to vendors' marketing.
Danese: human nature, maybe, to join
Dawn: expects the enterprise customers to join the community, due to its nature
What is the complete set of features offered to the full [not developer only] community?
Dawn sees it evolving from a code management tool and mailing list to forums, blogs, and wikis.
Andy looks at the Exchange where community members can post and find projects.
Danese cites Launchpad.
Chris brings up the next question as to who speaks for the customers in blogs, forums, IRC, IM, etc.
Attracting and growing?
Danese went through a variety of examples from running contests to having proselytizers running around the globe. Figure out why you want the community and where you want the project to go.
Chris and Danese agrees that the community manager or diva can kill themselves travelling.
Dawn brought up Facebook; the ways to pull in people is as diverse as the communities.
Other than hiring developers, do any of the panel hire consultants from the community?
Chris: always, or funding community projects.
Andy: bounty program.
Danese: remember that typical consulting contracts won't fly. In the early days, FSF had an attribution clause, but other companies may need to consider other legal vehicles.
Dawn has experience in getting creative with supporting individual community members other than monetarily. This is not summer of code, btw.
It's easy in the global political sphere to see if a country is democratic, but not if it has effective checks and balances to make democracy work. Open Source is somewhat the same.
Chris doesn't have a problem with communities forking project; in some ways it's a success metric. Open Source is self-selective.
Danese feels that the questions stems from companies entering open source strategies, but have difficulty loosing control.
Dawn agrees that companies that want to control and strongly influence their community are not strong candidates for open source-ing their product.
Any stories of where one tried to highlight controversy within the community to spur development; how to assure that there is enough conflict happening?
Bugs, contests, questions on the forums.
Some feel that the open source strategy is about making development cheaper and reduces sales and marketing need.
Danese: open source is about the community and doesn't really reduce these costs.
Dawn agrees that community may not offset marketing costs, you get word of mouth, but if your product sucks, it won't be good.
Andy feels that it takes time, effort and cost to spin-up and maintain these communities; but the benefits are tremendous; training content really helps to build the community.
Chris states that community is a cost of doing business in IT, open source or not.
The role of community facilitator is a unique blend of marketing and technical expertise.
Raven pointed out the some companies hired a facilitator, but didn't give them any backing, funding, authority, anything. Danese told the OpenOffice.org story of starting with a full marketing staff of 6, and moving towards allowing anyone who wanted to advocate OpenOffice.org even downloading a business card.
Andy: the community for SugarCRM has a lot of business users, but the development community is a key focus.
Dawn sees groups forming within developer communities, such as GUI.
Danese points out that Ubuntu maintains separate user and developer communities.
SugarCRM started out on Sourceforge and in parallel built a commercial side.
Dawn thinks that the key people of a product must be a part of the company.
Danese brings up Ubuntu and how Canonical and Debian interact.
There is a new mean of product and project management coming about from open source. Product managers are very much the one group that could be named as being upset about open source.
http://press.teleinteractive.net/.Mk3ucWch7fhVbndsciwcFvbhxzcQxbcj0rf7uyb2e_cnb3/trackback.php/769
05/23/07 @ 19:49
05/23/07 @ 22:44
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