Do we need a formal, democratic, non-profit Organization for organizing the Nextcloud community?

this is exactly the point. The company requests help from the community here and expects user to report problems in the completely different place, with another accounts and different expectations - Github is primary for reporting bugs - which might not be exactly the problem - maybe missing docs and explanations/discussions in the forum would help more at this stageā€¦

Yes thatā€™s right, but on the other hand most of the questions here break down to the same problems already answered a few times. Just because most users are too lazy to use the search function. So in my opinion itā€™s a waste of time if all devs came here to answer these questions over and over again. Btw some devs do indeed come here and answer the threads. :slight_smile:

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Well it makes sense to handle bugs at one place and not at github, the forum, twitter, facebook and so on. The code is at github as well.

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For your interest: https://owncloud.com/news/the-owncloud-community-program/

Above-linked post mostly describes official recognition (ā€œbadgesā€ for cover letters) for community participation of various kinds. Community tech professionals get, in addition, ā€œopportunities to engage with our engineersā€:

Members of the ownCloud Professional Community Program are eligible to receive some benefits. These benefits include reference letters, workshops and opportunities to engage with our engineers. Members can request a Community Professional badge. With this program, we want to enable the transfer of knowledge to and from the technical community and show our appreciation by honoring the most active professional community members.

Itā€™s a recognition of services rather than a commitment to much of anything, but it does seem like a good move, and a step forward from when I last checked in on OC.

In the past Nextcloud conferences, community members were also invited (developers, people from the forum). It was less formal, no special community badges. Also for hackathons, and other events.

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Sounds a little like what Iā€™m looking for. Establishing some kind of two-way communication on every boundary between the core team, professionals, enthusiasts and enhanced users would allow everybody to better understand the product and requirementsā€¦ on the other side discussing community benefits of ownCloud within Nextcloud thread which started with an idea to separate a part of community sounds really weirdā€¦ the optimistic part in me trusts this might result in both communities to learn from each other and join their forces against ā€œhyperscalersā€

I just posted a link. I am mostly pretty happy how the Nextcloud project is doing.

  1. We have the forum badges which are more detailed. No idea if thay are checked by the other forum users or by @jospoortvliet and other Nextcloud GmbH employees when answering in the forumā€¦

  2. I would not fit in the ā€œwnCloud Professional Community Programā€

So in general, my thought is that if weā€™d want to change things, we should copy ideas from successful, growing communities instead :see_no_evil:

ā€¦ yeah, and we all miss that and we will certainly revive that as soon as we physically/covid-wise can.

We are, by the way, hiring in the ā€˜communityā€™ area, see Nextcloud is looking for people who want to join our team - but their job would be more in the developer community side, working on things like documentation and such.

@wwe You make good points, and some of our devs and people do contribute and answer questions in the forum, but many, if not most, are simply already too busy with github and customer support to have much time for that. I will and do encourage the team to do this, but keep also in mind that we donā€™t manage our team by the hour or something like that - people have quite a bit of freedom at Nextcloud in how they spend their time.

We often hire people from the community - even directly from the forums - hi @szaimen
:wink: so that helps improve the connection, of course.

We are a bit wary of hiring a dedicated community manager who would interact with the community. We see it as a risk that people internally will feel like itā€™s that personā€™s job to interact with the community so they donā€™t have to. And thatā€™s bad, everyone in our company should be open to collaboration and community :wink: Weā€™ve seen this happen at some other companies, so it is certainly a real risk.

Also, please see https://help.nextcloud.com/about - and think about the number of questions being asked - 598 topics, 4.5k messages per month, 2.6K active users - it would be very hard for our still rather small team (we have about 35-40 engineers as of this month) to meaningfully interact with a large percentage of those conversations and people. So honestly, while we grow fast of course, Iā€™m not sure we will soon get to a level where we can really be super present, unless we put in a lot of effort we canā€™t really afford.

So we simply depend on our community members who support others and collaborate here - we just canā€™t do that, we need all of you to help out a bit.

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@jospoortvliet I really appreciate

I think this is a good way to include engaged people.

Depending on your goals this might be a better option. Once you see the devs are too busy fixing Github bugs and donā€™t get in touch with this forum - dedicated community manager role might be a good alternative. may not even as dedicated person but a task - so every engineer has to spend little time interacting with the forum from time to time. I know such concept from bigger settled companies who rotate everybody even CEO into every roleā€¦ this could be one wayā€¦ the other way would be to empower some of community members with (more) direct connection to the devsā€¦

but in general my point is more to know what happens and which direction you are approachingā€¦

I would love to be a hired community manager fwiw. So, yeahā€¦ Iā€™d take on such a role if it were possible. :heart:

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This is a move to looks like a Owncloud 2.0 ?

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Honest question, does anyone know how the owncloud community works? If it is a whole different topic Iā€™m happy to split this into a different thread. Obviously interested to know if any aspects of it might be fruitful in this discussion we are having.