Steven Walling wrote:
On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 1:53 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Theoretical overlap, perhaps. People in the role of "Community Liaison, Product Development and Strategic Change Management", a title Orwell would be proud of, are not doing what's being described in this e-mail. The current community liaisons are really paid advocates and they're tasked with shilling bad products. This isn't the fault of the people in these roles, many of whom I know and respect, but we should be honest that their role is much closer to that of a marketer or public relations person.
You're being a jerk in this paragraph, Max. There is a huge difference in attitude, skills, and experience between marketers/PR people and the Wikimedians that work in the community liason role. The community liasons put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to advocate not only *to *the community, but *for it* within the Foundation. They do this quietly, often behind the scenes, and with little praise. If you know and respect these people, the respectful thing would not be to reduce their very hard jobs to a pithy but inaccurate summary for your rhetorical purposes.
Blood, sweat, and tears? A very hard job? I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. Being an emergency room doctor, for example, is a very hard job that involves blood, sweat, and tears. What you're describing doesn't seem to match reality. Some might even describe it as rhetoric.
I'll stand by what I said previously. The community liaisons (two Is) are currently in the role of trying to sell the community on bad software. Good software, surprisingly, doesn't need hired "community liaisons" to roam around the large wikis to explain and defend its virtues. If you want to respond to the substantive point, please do. Otherwise, I don't really think it's fair nor productive to simply make appeals to emotion.
MZMcBride