[Ootb-hive] The Order of the Bee

Richard Esplin richard.esplin at alfresco.com
Tue Jun 10 18:41:46 BST 2014


Sorry about the delay. I'm back from vacation and pretty swamped with a new 
boss, new team, and new expectations. It's going to take me a while to sort it 
out.

As always Boriss, I find your approach to be very constructive and useful. A  
few quick thoughts:

* I love the name
* Who are the OOTB members? Can I join?
* Are the archives for ootb-hive public anywhere? I think we should do as much 
as possible in public.
* As Jeff mentioned, I worry about overlap between some of your immediate goals 
and our initiatives such as the new Community Home Page. I wonder how we can 
make them dovetail better. But I agree that it is better that your team takes 
initiative than wait around for us.
* I can help arrange a server for hosting a model Alfresco Community Edition 
instance. If I can't get budget for an AWS instance, I can contribute a 
personal server.

Please keep me informed. Jeff's departure has opened a new round of  
discussions with senior management on how Alfresco wants to engage with the 
community, and this is great information to have.

Thank you again,

Richard

On Wednesday, June 04, 2014 23:52:43 Boriss Mejias wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
> 
> Very useful feedback and thanks for your enthusiasm on the idea. I'm going
> again for 5 days offline, so I'll be back on Tuesday, but a few words
> before that.
> 
> I think those two major groups of activities you mentioned is a key part of
> the mission, so it is a great summary of what we want to achieve. With the
> first one we target the Alfresco Community = the people, and with the
> second one we target the Community Edition = the software.
> 
> That's it for now.
> More to come next week.
> cheers
> Boriss
> 
> On 3 June 2014 01:28, Jeff Potts <jeff.potts at alfresco.com> wrote:
> > 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
> > Simple + Smart
> > 
> > Join us at Alfresco Summit | San Francisco, Sep 23-25 | London, Oct 7-9 |
> > http://summit.alfresco.com
> > 
> > alfresco.com | twitter.com/alfresco | facebook.com/alfrescosoftware |
> > blogs.alfresco.com | linkedin.com/company/alfresco |
> > youtube.com/alfresco101
> > 
> > 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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