Since it seemed fairly relevant, I made a point to attend Stormy Peters‘ talk “What does a community manager do?” on the first day of SCALE. Having just taken on that role here with openSUSE, I was curious to see whether my job description was in line with Peters’ interpretation of the community manager role, and also wanted to see if I could snag a few good ideas.

Stormy Peters talks about community managers

I was pleased to see that 1) a lot of people in the room (maybe one-third) were community managers (if by that title or another), and 2) the people in attendance seemed to largely agree on what, in fact, community managers are supposed to be doing.

So what are community managers supposed to be doing? Well, here’s a short list:

• Community managers advocate for the community.
• Community managers help the community grow.
• Community managers work as an “interpreter” to explain community problems to the developers and the project leadership/company.
• Community managers tend to the overall health of the community.

What community managers don’t do:

• Community managers don’t tell people what to do.

That’s probably the most important point right there — community managers for open source projects have a responsibility to care for the relationship between the company and the open source community, to advocate for the community, and to help the community grow — but it’s not a “managerial” role in the sense of having authority over the community. It’s really the other way ’round — a good community manager is working for the community, and that’s what I’m interested in doing with openSUSE.

Apparently, it’s a growing field, too — Peters says she found about 50 companies looking to hire “community managers” — and many of these companies are outside of open source. That tells me that a lot of companies are looking to understand their customers and have a two-way conversation with the folks who support their business. (As opposed to, say, the one-way communication between organizations like the MPAA and RIAA — where customers have been saying “hi, we really want to have music and movies in formats we can enjoy on any device, without the nasty DRM, thanks!” and the RIAA and MPAA have been saying “we can’t hear yooooou!” and “prepare to get sued!” That’s the most extreme example, but the bottom line is that a lot of companies could do a better job of listening to the people they do business with — and some are starting to realize that.)

Overall, Peters’ talk was a lot of fun, she’s a really engaging speaker and did a great job of getting the audience involved and getting feedback from the group — I’d strongly recommend catching one of her talks if you have the opportunity to do so at another conference and to check out her blog. She’ll be giving a keynote talk here at SCALE on Sunday, and I’m really looking forward to that one as well.

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