[Ootb-hive] The Order of the Bee

[Jeff Potts]

This sounds great, I am all for it in concept.

My initial thought is that Richard has the same goal as you do, which is to
convey the importance of open source and the community to Alfresco
leadership (and echo'd back to the broader community). But he's only one
guy so, obviously, needs the help of the bees. So I'm just wondering if
there are certain pieces of this that could be hosted at Alfresco but with
the community given edit access. Just a thought.

Just brainstorming here, I think there are two major groups of activities:
(1) Promoting and encouraging contributions, collaboration, and activity in
the ecosystem regardless of edition and (2) Encouraging the download,
installation, and production use of Community Edition.

Anything in the first bucket is a no-brainer. So highlighting add-ons,
translations, bug reports, bug fixes, blog posts, tutorials, screencasts,
helpful forum members, active IRC channels, meetups, etc. falls in this
category. This stuff should be showing up in newsletters, in the wiki, on
the community landing page. It should be part of a report that goes to
management that has metrics that says, "Here's what the community did this
quarter".

As I mentioned in my talk, Richard and I are having fun but not scaling. Me
leaving does not help that. :) He can't be everywhere or see everything.
Maybe there's a way the community can "report in" every month or something.
Then Richard can take that up the chain. The challenge is that the most
vocal members who are motivated to report in are a fairly small (but
passionate!) group. So, really, this kind of thing needs to be automated as
much as possible.

It's the stuff in the second bucket--actively promoting CE--that is
challenging. This is the nature of *commercial* open source--there is
always this tension between sales, who often sees the free software as
competition, and the community who tends to see the longer-term view. At
some level, everyone understands that a large number of Enterprise Edition
users started as Community Edition users, but highly-visible promotional
activities around Community Edition feel competitive and even
antagonistic/inflammatory to sales and management. As a simple example,
Alfresco struggles to figure out where/how to list CE on the web site. Too
much prominence and sales gets mad. Too little and the community team gets
mad (and downloads drop).

So you're unlikely to see Alfresco do much more than say, "Here is
Community Edition if you want to download it, go ahead". (In fact, you may
have noticed that the opt-in CE download was recently removed--you must now
provide an email address to download unless you go to SourceForge or some
other source).

Ultimately, the community is free to do whatever it wants, subject to the
license. My only advice at the moment (maybe I'll have more after Friday)
is to look for ways to help Richard meet his goals and avoid duplicating
work for the first bucket. For the second bucket, it's going to depend on
how close to "the line" you want to take it.

Jeff







Jeff Potts
Chief Community Officer
Mobile: +1 214 405 4957
Skype: jeffpotts01
Blog: ecmarchitect.com

Alfresco
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On 2 June 2014 17:26, Boriss Mejias <tchorix at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Jeff and Richard,
>
> I'm sending you this email on behalf of the members of the Order of the
> Bee (OOTB, in Cc), a new organization with a name completely inspired on
> Jeff's community keynote in Barcelona.
>
> Call it telepathy, coincidence, but the time couldn't be better given the
> fact that Jeff is leaving Alfresco. On Friday, May 23, while talking to
> some fellows on the IRC channel (not logged, just PM) we decided to create
> the OOTB with the following goal: Guarantee the existence of the Alfresco
> Community based on a free/libre solution for document management.
>
> As you guys know, we are worried that the current management of Alfresco
> doesn't see the value of Alfresco being open source, but for us, that's a
> core thing for having this great community. We also think that Alfresco
> wouldn't be what it is without its community. And by community, we don't
> mean users of Alfresco Community edition, but also people using Alfresco
> Enterprise, Alfresco partners, and Alfresco employees willing to
> collaborate with each other to create a better software, and a better
> community.
>
> So, our first goal is to make the contribution of the community shine on
> the eyes of Alfresco management, so that they keep committed to give
> support to the community, and keep Alfresco open source.
>
> To achieve such goal, we are going to host an Alfresco instance with
> several of the best addons made by the community. We will also need some
> plain html site to show and link other kind contributions such as meetups,
> irc channel, forums and blog posts. The most important concept behind the
> order is that Alfresco as a company, *together* with the Alfresco Community
> can get the best of Alfresco as a software.
>
> We are telling you this because you guys are our interface to Alfresco (as
> a company) and we want some feedback about the idea, to help us focus on
> the best approach to make our statement as strong as possible.
>
> So, feedback is welcome.
> cheers
> Boriss
>
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