
The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce - Tsiolkovsky
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107555540696571114069/posts/DHEx1tu5dSK
======
notacoward
As someone who has worked on a project both with and without community
managers, having to do some of that myself when we didn't have one, I think
it's a valuable role. Does it really make sense to take developers away from
development to do any of the following?

* Organize meetups, hackathons, etc.

* Deliver presentations and/or get not-enthusiastic developers to do so.

* Initiate or sustain joint efforts with people on other projects, so they don't stagnate every time developers get distracted by other commitments.

* Get all that stuff from social media into the correct channels.

Most developers are not good at those things, and do not enjoy them. If your
project is lucky enough to have some people who will do those things on their
own time (or on company time without getting fired because they're not meeting
code deadlines) then good for you. Many don't.

Sure, there's always tension between community and corporate needs. Again, who
would you rather have managing that tension? Some introverted developer who
only sees the world through the lens of the code as its already written, or
somebody with better perspective and people skills?

Not every project needs a community manager. However, those that do will get
one - either dedicated, or stolen from bits and pieces of other project
members' time. Personally, I think it's a good thing when the project's
technical leaders can shove all that other stuff onto somebody else.

~~~
jarofgreen
Is this not completely missing the point of the blog post? I didn't read it as
saying you should never have someone doing the things you list, but as being
about against a certain job spec that get's labelled as "community manager".
The test outlined in point A was a pretty good one.

~~~
exelius
It's all well and good having a "pure" open source project; but at some point
things become too big for someone to run in their spare time.

Really, it should be about having proper project governance. If a project is
big enough, there should be some sort of board of directors with a combination
of technical people and some representation from the user community, which is
where I see "community managers" fitting in. Like it or not, the companies
these community managers often represent ARE users of the product, and often
provide funding to support open source projects. IMO, funding open source
projects should absolutely get you "special treatment" because it incentivizes
companies to support open source projects financially (see OpenSSL for what
happens when they don't.)

Apache seems to run this model the best; but there are a lot of projects under
their umbrella and some are run better than others. And it still depends
heavily on the management skills of the project leads; but that seems to be
what the development community wants.

------
mattzito
This is such a non-event that it seems not even worth posting about, being in
the same vein as:

\- _gasp_ "Sometimes corporate-sponsored open-source developers have their
corporate employers' interests at heart"

\- _gasp_ "Sometimes support people toe the party line instead of telling
customers really what is going on"

\- _gasp_ "Sometimes marketing teams amp up new features to make them appear
more important than they are"

and so on and so on. Good community managers help represent the community to
their employers as well as helping to coordinate the community at large. Bad
community managers exploit the community as a marketing and PR channel at the
expense of honest communication within the community.

~~~
madeofpalk
I'm not sure if it's a non-event as much as a whinge about nomenclature.

I get the feeling the author would feel a lot better if we didn't use the
'community manager' euphemism and just said like 'PR' or something instead.

~~~
mattzito
Community management by defintion includes "PR" in that it includes "Public
Relations", but a good community manager is much more.

They're often there to help facilitate conversations, user group meetings,
keep the community civil, agitate for better customer support, and so on. Yes,
they're cheerleaders to a certain degree, but pretty much any customer/public-
facing role at a company needs to have a bit of cheerleader in them.

------
onion2k
I think there's an assumption that a community based around a corporation is
automatically going to be used for something nefarious and underhanded. Is
that definitely the case? There are corporations that have "community
managers" whose job is specifically to keep the community running smoothly
from the corporate side - examples being the developer community that
surrounds the likes of Apple and Microsoft. That doesn't make the community
any less of a real community though.

~~~
hobs
You are not wrong, there can be (and I think it gels with his post)
communities that have no management, communities that are successfully managed
by someone who is paid by a private corporation, etc. The word community isnt
just a gathering of people.

I think the deeper point though is that this type of role can in fact have
great power over the community, and that it is clear where the hand that feeds
them is coming from.

For example: In the SQL Server (MS) community, there are professionals that
earn an "MVP" status, which is Microsoft's acknowledgement of the work and
evangelism they have done in regards to the product.

Recently, a guy named Brent Ozar (an MVP) called Microsoft out on some bull
they were pulling, moving features to enterprise edition and limiting RAM
until you went to enterprise licensing (SQL 2014).

Plenty of people in the community of the same stature came out to warn him to
be quiet, or to finally say something after someone with more weight brought
up the issue.

This kind of community management automatically sets people's biases up to not
only say what the corporation is doing is right; even if they personally think
otherwise they avoid speaking out about it because they would lose this shiny
medal.

------
fennecfoxen
TLDR: some communities are built around corporate overlords and there's a
Community Manager person who tries to get them to be useful for the corporate
overlords while still being generally happy. This is, like, soooo un-grass-
roots and inauthentic it hurts! Somebody dial the waah-mbulance.

~~~
ChrisPebble
His expectations for what a community and community manager should be are
certainly set extraordinarily high:

> "In summary: a 'community manager' is really an 'audience handler' .... and
> frankly I've run out of patience for the deception."

I've never been under the delusion that community managers from WoW to
Microsoft are there primarily to keep everything from spinning out of control.

------
blowski
Like so many things, a community manager is neither necessary nor sufficient
for a good community. But it can still be a good idea to have one.

Like all roles - finance manager, IT manager, HR manager, etc - just
appointing one won't fix all problems, but it's a good start if you're having
problems in that area and trying to fix them. Having somebody in the room that
represents that business concern, and knows what they're talking about, helps.

------
andmarios
Since most people seem to don't know who Seigo is; Aaron was president of KDE
eV for a couple years. He is one of the top KDE developers for more than a
decade and one of the main architects of KDE4, Plasma and semantic-desktop,
upon the principles of which many companies now build their OSes. AFAIK he is
also one of the few people that actually tried to create open source hardware
and not just a cheap embedded system that runs Linux with binary drivers.

So he is heavily involved with one of the largest free software communities
for more than a decade now and thus his opinions have a certain weight.

------
morgo
I am a Community Manager (for MySQL at Oracle).

I don't find anything particularly offensive with what Aaron has to say. The
scenarios are certainly all possible... but I don't think I've ever seen a CM
pull rank and say "I'm the manager!". I agree that CM is a terrible title
because it opens up mistrust by being so nebulous.

I would be happy to be called a Community Liaison (something suggested in the
comments).

------
coffeemug
The term "community manager" is perhaps a misnomer. A better term might be
"community supporter." We have a community manager/supporter at RethinkDB, and
here is what Christina does:

    
    
      - Proactively reaches out to users to see if they need help, then
        connects them to the developers on the team in case they need
        something but haven't reached out themselves (which is
        surprisingly common).
      - Searches for meetups related to our product/company and helps
        meetup organizers by sending them gifts for the attendees,
        gives them occasional food budget, organizational advice, etc.
      - Organizes our own meetups and makes sure food, drinks, label
        printer, venue, and a million other things that go into events
        are all set up and ready to go for the attendees.
      - When she notices community members are working on related
        projects, she acts as a network hub and connects them to each
        other.
      - A million other things that need to get done when you have a
        large, distributed, non-hierarchical group of people trying to
        accomplish something.
    

We use the term "community manager" because that's what the industry
standardized on, but really she's not managing anything. She supports the
community in every way she can, so really, she's a "community supporter". It's
a vital role, and every good open-source project has someone doing the job,
though they may not necessarily have an explicit title.

~~~
coldtea
Yes, but then again you're not a community -- you're a company.

------
fredfoobar42
> If your community has a "manager", it isn't being treated as a community and
> probably isn't a community to begin with. A better description might fall
> within: a) a con job where someone is attempting to get people to
> participate on their terms for their benefit while trying to convince them
> that isn't the case at all and everyone is equally in it together; b) a cult
> organization; c) a captive audience being actively groomed for marketing
> purposes ... perhaps a mix of the above. Not, however, a community.

Oh, man... This has been my experience, completely. I was hired as a
"Community Associate" and later promoted to "Community Lead" for a FinTech
startup in NYC. "Con Job" is the perfect way to describe it. The company's
idea to increase user growth was to simply BUY contact information of people
in the field the product was targeted for, and add them to their MailChimp
list. After getting promoted (well, after my boss was fired), I fought
vociferously to end the practice, knowing it would bite them in the ass. I
left in October of 2013, and I've kept an eye waiting for the other shoe to
drop.

------
corobo
> Could you share what you read this morning that set you off?﻿

This guy makes a good point.

As a side note I didn't manage to get through that, it sounded far too ranty
and overused "quotation marks" in a way that made it hard to read.

It is also a bit of a "giant who cares" piece really too

------
rrd
This post echos my sentiments about the Stack Exchange community managers.
Stack Exchange the company doesn't want to pay for the manpower and expertise
to moderate all their sites ("communities") so they hold moderator elections
and get people involved with the site to do it for free. They provide these
volunteers with a sense of authority and ownership over the communities, but
if there's ever a disagreement between the moderators and the "community
managers", guess who wins?

------
mratzloff
I think "community liaison" would probably be a more apt title. But I think
his point is that without some say in the product a community isn't a
community.

~~~
morgo
Totally agree. Or in some cases: Product Manager or Technology Evangelist.

------
falcolas
And yet, some communities do need managers. As in shepards to sort through the
flock's needs, and ensure that they're being met. They also act as the public
face of the company, and can be very important.

As an example of a great community manager who added to the community that
grew up around a corporation, see Ghostcrawler.

~~~
Ntrails
I assumed initially that this was related to the PGI Transverse/MechWarrior
Online debacle with the community manager who waged a war on the most vocal
part of his player base (and kind of lost).

It seems to me that with online games the community manager role is both very
important and poorly understood. Realistically it's customer relations, PR,
and so on. But MMOs _are_ communities - and volatile ones at that. It can't be
easy.

------
brm
This has been a problem for a while, and by this I mean using the term
community manager to refer to a business development, social media pr, or
event planning role.

There is in fact a job out there that actually entails supporting and
nurturing a community and its vitally important to the health of online
communities (not firms dressed up as 'communities').

The best example I can think of is the work Heather Champ did at flickr:
[http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Nasty-as-they-
wanna-b...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Nasty-as-they-wanna-be-
Policing-Flickr-com-2480224.php)

------
VLM
TLDR seems to be there is an unspoken priority between the words community and
manager that is often wrong, and a hierarchy between the community and whoever
pays the managers bills that is often wrong.

There is also a side dish of dogfood WRT eating your own dogfood, if you
insulate your coders and company from the community effectively enough, you
schism the community.

------
tehabe
Why do people still use such a narrow definition of what a "manager" is?

It is almost as bad as the word "politician".

------
falsestprophet
I think "community organizer" is a better term.

------
joeevans1000
I prefer the common and honest title of 'evangelist'. That title addresses all
the author's concerns.

------
tpush
He seems to be really obsessed with Canonical and its (former) Community
Manager Jono Bacon.

------
jmsdnns
In a decentralized world, community management might be a core piece of
marketing.

------
bikamonki
Well put.

------
charlie_vill
To whoever wrote this;

Dude, chillax.

------
anotherevan
Wow, that's a really big axe you've got against the grindstone there.

------
blueskin_
True, but also blindingly obvious - just see the recent reddit censorship
drama.

