hair-pulling frustration

[Richard Gaskin]

Alex Tweedly wrote:

> It would seem "touchy-feely" for there to be more response on this list
> from RR.

I tend to feel the same, but as with so many things it's a balancing act 
- after all, one of the reasons we want them here is to tell them to go 
away so they can spend their time fixing bugs. :)

We have seen a strong increase in other communications like the 
newsletters and the blog, and from time to time we see Fraser, Neil, 
Ben, and once in a while even Kevin here, more so than in years past.

Certainly wouldn't hurt to see more of them (though Neil posted here 
just this morning), but with all they've been doing it's not always easy 
to get the time for more posts here and in the forums than they make 
already.


> You (Richard) are doing a great job as Community Manager, and responding
> here.
> How about you get an email address like richard at runrev.com so that it
> does feel more like a RR response :-)

Two reasons:

1. I'm not an employee of RunRev, and volunteered primarily to support 
community contributions to the open source project.   I feel it's 
important in a role of community advocacy to be able to speak candidly, 
and an address at the corporate domain might seem a mixed message.

2. I'm lazy.  I do have an address at livecode.org (the community side 
of things), but simply hadn't taken the time to set up a separate 
subscription to this list under that address.  I get mail there, though, 
and note it in posts where I'm wearing the CM hat.

That said, I took your advice and just set up a subscription from the 
.org address.   If you can read this, it worked.

As a practical matter (read, "I still run a business in between these 
volunteer activities") I may not always remember to change my default 
address when replying, but I'll continue to try to use my CM sigline 
where appropriate.


> I suspect this list is mostly us old dinosaurs, and most of the newer
> users are on the forums, and *we* should all know who you are - but it
> would maybe help remind us that you have a role within RR and are
> effectively part of the RR team taking in our input.

Unless you spend a lot of time hanging out with FOSS geeks, it's not 
always clear what a Community Manager even is.

I didn't really know either until I met Jono Bacon back when he was the 
Ubuntu Community Manager, and I didn't really understand the scope of 
the role until I read his book, "The Art of Community".

Ubuntu has been a very liberating platform for many of my business 
activities, both client and server, and the more I learn about how it's 
made the more it's become clear that it would be very difficult to pull 
that off if it were solely a corporate effort or solely a community 
effort.

Many such projects really benefit a lot from the partnership between the 
corporate stewards and a supportive community, accomplishing more 
together than they could alone.

When Kevin announced that LC was going FOSS, he can tell you how 
annoying I became in my insistence that the project could use a CM to 
really make the most of this new community focus.

After enough times of him reminding me that he needs to keep his staff 
on engineering and QA, I finally just volunteered for the role as my own 
contribution to the project.  I justify the expense in the same way I 
donate resources to the Ubuntu project:  I run a business dependent on 
technology, and it benefits the work I do to see the tech I need thrive.

In an environment in which most of the current audience spends most of 
our time making and using proprietary software, there's a lot for all of 
us to learn about how this collaboration between the business and the 
community can work to the greatest benefit of our own goals.

When I first took on this role we put an outline of some of that into 
the newsletter:
<http://newsletters.livecode.com/april/issue169/newsletter1.html>

But that's not enough.  There's so much to learn and discover.  LiveCode 
is a very big deal, not only in the scope of its code base but in its 
potential impact on the world.

Together I believe we can see a world in which anyone with a computing 
device can get more out of it by truly mastering it through LiveCode.

As we go forward, with good suggestions like Sean's this morning and the 
others that come along, step by step we'll get there.

-- 
Richard Gaskin
LiveCode Community Manager
richard at livecode.org