The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce | Hacker News Reader

The “community manager” role is a fraud and a farce

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131 pointsTsiolkovsky45 comments

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.

> 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?

And here we go again, someone calling all developers introverts. Could we please stop that nonsense? There are certainly some introverts between developers, but not more than in any other high skill profession.

That's not how I read it at all, and I'm somewhat introverted and definitely a developer. Nonsense is taking a comment like this so personally and blowing it way out of proportion.

I don't believe, nor did I imply, that all developers are introverts. However, presenting at conferences etc. takes a more than average degree of extroversion. IIRC, public speaking is one of the most common fears even among average people. A majority of developers certainly do fall below that threshold. Besides E vs. I, there's also an aspect of developers wanting to focus on their one favorite task and not context-switch to an entirely different one. For whatever reason, many projects do lack any developers with the skills or inclination to perform the community-manager role well.

Exactly. Even among other technical groups, you will find those who would rather be "in the weeds" than having to deal with people problems (people suck).

> A majority of developers do fall below that threshold

Do you have statistics to back this up? Presentations at engineering conferences are almost always given by developers, often one's who have dual roles such as evangelists or sales engineers but sometimes by heads down individual contributors. I think this view in the tech industry that most developers are introverts or "lack the skills" to interact socially for business is myopic; perpetuating the stereotype might help for division of labor but I don't think notion is true at all. Engineers are overrepresented as CEOs in the United States (33%) and that is certainly a very public facing role.

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.

Being a community manager for a large project can require a full-time effort, so why shouldn't it be a full-time job with a corresponding title and description? Sure, that person will have be paid by someone, but that doesn't mean they'll always favor corporate interests or that they have no accountability. Where I work (Red Hat) we have many people who work both as developers and community managers on "upstream" projects. Sometimes they really do seem to be working at cross-purposes to each other or to their corresponding "downstream" (commercial/paid) projects, and that's OK because we as a company have made a commitment to give them that freedom. Those who are community managers are accountable to their own bosses for the results they achieve upstream. I don't see how any of this is problamatic, let alone some sort of fraud or farce as the rather whiny OP claims. These people do a valuable job that benefits the upstream project, and they get paid for it. End of story.

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.

From what I could tell, he just dislikes the word "manager" which makes for a pretty thin argument.

In the end, it comes down to economics and how fungible goodwill/vanity/reputation/time/money are.

As someone who works as both a maintainer and community manager of an open source project, I find it naive to think that an open source project can thrive completely free of corporate sponsorship/benevolent dictatorship.

For example, I am hired by Treasure Data, Inc. to work full time on Fluentd (https://fluentd.org), the open source log collector. Treasure Data does use Fluentd, and Fluentd is a core piece of the technology that we offer to our customers. However, my boss explicitly tells me NOT to herd the community to serve our interest. Why? Because we know that we benefit a lot from the Fluentd community both for community contributions and awareness, and it servers our corporate interest to ensure that we stay on good terms with the community.

At the end of the day, open source community members are intelligent. They can smell when companies start exploiting the community to serve their own interest, especially in a way that's not beneficial to the community. So, in that sense, my response to the OP is "let the community decide. if enough people hate on community managers, they will disappear."

That being said, I can agree with the OP that "community manager" might not be the best nomenclature here. But that doesn't mean open source communities do not need the go-to person for ensuring the community's health and longevity. Whether that person is called a community manager, mailing list patrol, event coordinator, conflict resolver, or geek herder is somewhat irrelevant.

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.

this

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.

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.

A whinge about nomenclature is what I got out of it. At SimplyBuilt we have staff members that foster communication, provide support, and delete spam/irrelevant posts. In our case (and in most cases I guess) the word 'community manager' would have a high handed sound to it, even though they are technically managing a forum.

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.

This is a great point.

There are different types of communities, and judging them isn't really a high-value pursuit.

Think about things like the "SHARE" community around IBM mainframe and other products. Obviously it's in IBM's interest to have people getting together talking about doing more stuff with IBM crap... but it's very valuable for those users as well.

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.

but the it isnt a role to manage a community as much as to manage the relation between the community and the corporation. So "community relation manager" would be more appropriate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

> 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.

> 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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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

I think "community organizer" is a better term.

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

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

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

Well put.

To whoever wrote this;

Dude, chillax.

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

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

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