Aaron Seigo had something to say about community managers

Sep 16, 2014 09:55 GMT  ·  By

The community managers play a very important role in the open source community and they usually shape up the projects they work on, but it looks like not everyone agrees with their function.

KDE developer Aaron Seigo is a very outspoken person and he is known for his strong opinions. He recently proposed for public debate a very heated and interesting subject about the role of the community managers for the open source project.

He thinks that the community managers' role, as they are working today on various projects, is actually a fraud and a farce. It's unclear what determined him to make this statement, but he knew right from the start that it was going to rile up the community and various community managers.

Aaron Seigo: Communities don't have "managers"; synthetic, organized, hierarchical organizations do

The message was posted by the KDE developer on his Google+ page and he got what he was looking for – a powerful response from the community. Some agree with him, others think he is hitting some important issues, and a few others think that he's just wrong.

"Here we go, flame throwers on everyone: the "community manager" role that is increasingly common in the free software world is a fraud and a farce. 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," says Aaron Seigo.

One of the ideas of this rather long and eloquent post on Google+ is that companies are actually using the community managers to rally the community in the direction they want, and not the other way around.

He also says that real communities have facilitators and leaders of various forms and stripes, which are "accountable to the community, selected by the community, derive their influence from community consensus and can be replaced by the community at the community's behest."

Sounds like anyone you know?

This sounds a little like the Debian project, which is an example of democracy in the open source world. The target might just as well be the Ubuntu project, which has community managers chosen by Canonical. Aaron Seigo doesn't name names, but he leaves little room for interpretation.

So what do you think, is the role of a community manager a corrupted one?