Where have all the community managers gone?
Submitted by srlinuxx on Tue, 01/13/2009 - 23:01.
Over this summer, at OSCON, LinuxWorld, other events and in briefings and other conversations, I saw and heard a lot about the importance of community managers and in the time leading up to last fall, community manager was a hot enterprise topic and hot enterprise job in open source and in the industry in general.
However, as we have seen open source vendors trimming headcount just like many other companies in search of controlling costs and weathering the storm during recent months, community managers seem to be on the line among the layoffs. It’s not surprising to see these positions — which bridge commercial and community open source and tie vendors to their developers and users — thriving when times are good and companies are willing to invest in community, but suffering in difficult times, when the community may seem a less critical investment. This can be particularly true as vendors look at their sources of revenue and consider cuts wherever they can outside of that.
However, as we covered in an interesting discussion of the value of community on our last CAOS podcast, there is opportunity in sustaining an open source community in difficult times, even though it may be less of a revenue producer and more of an investment given users, developers and other community members are even less likely to be paying.
Also: Aaron Aseigo: building a community around your F/OSS project
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Linux community mgr is the president of its company ? Bad ?
You can be anybody in Linux, because its free for the taking. So, a self appointed community manager can take over the monetary part of the Linux business without knowing it. He or she can destroy the community at the worst. But prevent people from contributing to the Linux distro at the best.
It is really the job of the president of any Linux distro. To market to his community, derive an income from the community and share technology with company(owned) community to grow the community.
It is even the same at Tuxmachines.org. To build the community takes pride and encouragement, to have users enjoy its community. It must have a club belonging feeling. It has to have drives for contribution of money and equipment(technology), and collect talents(posts) and group of professionals in the industry, to advance and modernize the Linux world. Or even a community built ecommerce venture?
It seems none of the distros have Linux community that will give them purchase orders. Is it any wonder, when Linux is cheap skates. So, now we have netbook manufacturers who can get money for their products to help promote Linux operating system. And they got people who don't want to learn computers with Linux, to pay.
We are proud to get Linux paid for? Who wants it free then no more support, unless you do it for yourself? Too many gave up on using Linux for work, if only just works is true.
Footnote:
Here is a proposal for a contribution drive for money and equipment ending March 31st, 2009; to build an experimental Drupal node for ecommerce, by community inspired suggestions. Do we email all users or send out news releases? News releases for sure!