Shameless promotion of Wonderful service

You really should try out this wonderful service.

For a starter it will make me some commission…hey that’s not bad

Great Opportunity…click here!
(for the Curious, this is part of demo, of some technology, but if you are really curious, why not buy a really expensive 0800 number, pay for it, and see what happens next).

Now we have a OCME, how about a AppMngr

How to create a job for some someone to support FOSS to commercial customer base (rental London, budget £25-35K, but spec is “early days”)

We want to provide FOSS to our customers (small businesses), we think that it could be really great for them…but…
We need to “package” our services, and we need someone to help package them.

How will we get started?
We will install packages (Sugar CRM, CMS, Zimbra, Asterisk) for internal use, we will also install Kayako, although that’s not FOSS.

Packaging FOSS…
1) A set of “standard” tasks, which we would either automate, or create a standard tariff
2) Only installing it onto a limited set of platforms

Someone to do it
1) Building bridges between a rather “product orientated” operations orientated telco, and a creative (I really don’t want to be flamed) community, who are pretty patient when things don’t work right first time
2) Make sure that we are contributing back to the community
3) Who would like to see FOSS be used more widely in more applications

The job will be in London, and be £25-35K PA + bonus, but at this point we more interested in discussing the job, than reading the CV’s

- Who might be interested (and why)
- How would the FOSS community feel about this (PS we really think that we have some things to contribute in return0
- What kind of skills and experience to make this job a success

We have a new OCME…will that make me a better blogger?

We now have a new OCME (Online Community Manager / Editor), and she is now going up the learning curve, and going through the induction process (all sorts of opportunity for indoctrination jokes).  Anyway day2 and she has not run away screaming… looking good!

Now should we start a Blog on how this job is turning out…well let’s see

There is now the issue that I really ought to get a bit better at this blogging business (makes blogging sound like a swearword!)

Woken up….was I asleep that long

Well we are back up again, and we now have a Project(s) Manager on board.  She has started doing all sorts of good work, and now we are keen to get our Online Community Manager / Editor on board.

We have changed the job spec a bit:-

- 4 days per week (some people commented that 2.5 days was not that realistic)

- Additional focus on structure

Happy Easter to all (I know that we’re not meant to say that thing, these politically correct days, but as I’m an aestheist, I’m happy to wish most religions well, without much favour).

Delay in the hiring process

Sorry to announce that there is a delay in the hiring process.  we are currently (thu15jan09) hiring 2x people who are (very) key to our plans for this year.

• Online Community Manager / Editor
• Exec PA + Project Assistant

We suspended the processing of the applications for this (Online Community Manager / Editor) job, as the other HR project (exec PA  + Project Assistant) has taken more time than we planned, and we have decided to focus on one job at a time.

The job will still go ahead, there are no budget problems (always a worry in these days!), merely a “hours in day” problem.

We hope to start the selection process by end of week 06

Community editors…hot or flakey?

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes in read Write web that Community Manager jobs “are hot”, but the first comment wonders if the job might be risky in this economy.

My take on this, is that it all about the stability of the company, and the importance to the company of the job, and how it affects revenue.

In our company we are not dependent on advertising, we can justify this purely on “being really nice and useful to our customers”.  If the CommEdit can do that well, their job is very safe!!

Creating a “Community Editor” job…a missing link?

Welcome…more astute readers will notice the Darwin connection, and the rather gentle (or was it weak?) pun on the one-time family business.  I rather suspect that this will turn out to be almost as vague as creating a “web designer” job, but maybe with the help of others we can exercise this meme a bit.

Why are we doing it?

• For the customers, and therefore ourselves
• We have noticed that there are lots of good bits of FOSS that is pretty useless to many people because the documentation is really innappropriate to non-”technical experts”, or in some cases plain rubbish!  The FOSS finds it hard to cross the chasm from being interesting to the club of “techies” to being a main-stream and widely used product
• We think that creating a community will help us to do this (on a commercial basis), so that when a customer pays for us to install some FOSS on a box or in the cloud, then they will be empowered.
• We develop our products in 3 grades of quality (alpha, beta, gold), and we want to get a real discussion going so that we can “learn” quickly how to enable the products to graduate to higher levels of quality…quicker

What we hope that the Community Editor will do

• Build a useful knowledge base for our customers (but not just taking dictation/interviewing the developers).  Sure one can get started with the developers, but once users start to use a product then it takes on a life of it’s own.  Which leads onto the next bit
• Encourage forums for interested parties to discuss the products, and how to use them…well usefully for them!
• Liase with the support team, so that when there is a support call/email, where they think “we could have handled that better”, then we DO go ahead and handle it better
• Build Special Interest Communities, based around the technology and applications of our products (current and future).

Why I am nervous about it

• There are lots of balances that we must strike (“interesting stuff” vs “balanced knowledge”
• There might be quite a culture shock for someone joining our company

Why I hope that this will be an attractive job

• Money!! (well half time job pro-rata £72K PA)
• The new business model that we are working on is pretty innovative (we have not seen anyone else do it before)
• We are very committed to making a success of this

What I would really like to share (yes I do mean both ways)

• What are the management challenges
• How should we develop the role
• What kind of people are well suited to the job
• How we should measure the success of the projects
• Some simple case studies
• oh…and I suppose what the job actually is, and how it relates to the other depts

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