Community

Our good friend Joe Brockmeier, community manager for openSUSE, has just started blogging for ZDnet. In one of his inaugural posts, he ruminates over where a community manager belongs in corporate structure: engineering or marketing? His post was in response to Stormy Peters, who thinks the support team is a good place. As a fellow community manager, these posts are a fantastic opportunity for me to talk about a subject that’s near and dear to me: me.

I report to the VP of Marketing, and I won’t be shy about telling you that’s caused me a bit of stress. As an engineer, I always thought that marketing was just the art of yelling at the top of your lungs about some crappy product to people who don’t care, but that’s only true in organizations that don’t understand marketing. Marketing departments generally fall into two categories: ones that shout at the market and and ones that talk with it. The defining difference is whether marketing is an inspiration for the company’s strategy or merely its slave.

If my job were to coordinate bug fixes with upstream providers or negotiate solutions to interoperability issues (like it probably is for Joe Brockmeier from Novell), it’d probably make sense to think of it as an engineering discipline. If it were to find ways for developers to contribute to our application or govern the ones that already do (as it probably is for someone like Stormy at Gnome) it might be more appropriate under a product management team.

However, we’re dealing with a community of scale where our role is to provide the environment where people can produce - not to coordinate their actual production. So community management at SourceForge.net is about observing the community as a whole, engaging as much as we can, and tweaking the platform so that people can get more done. Since our marketing team is a “talking” team and not a “shouting” one, community management fits there nicely.