Mikey wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2019 7:45 pm
If someone is not on LC's BOD and is not privy to the financials and confidential c-suite information, they are not in a reasonable position to discuss resource allocation.
Perhaps. But if the person is a Community Liaison and has many ongoing discussions with the core team, we have reasonable assurance that such input is not entirely uninformed.
We also know this of all of life: the planet is finite, human life is finite, days are of fixed length. Nothing in the realm of human affairs is infinite, so everything involves tradeoffs.
Whether we're making our own business plans, or contributing to a Linux distro, or advising other people's business, every cost also carries an opportunity cost. That is, there's the direct cost of the proposed undertaking, and the indirect cost of no longer having those resources also available for other opportunities.
Accounting for the tradeoffs inherent in human activity is not generally considered controversial or at all exotic. It's how all organizations remain viable and grow.
I think a "reboot" would be assigning a person or team the responsibility, authority, resources and materials related to converting and onboarding. That person or team would get ownership and control of the manuals, videos, websites, forums, mailing lists, sample stacks, introductory offers and pricing, training, mentoring, and whatever else could be reasonably construed as being related to that one goal - turning clicking the "Download" button into a big grin every time the LC splash screen comes up.
That's an excellent vision, one which everyone, in the community and within the sponsor company, supports.
To fulfill that vision requires refining general sentiments into actionable proposals.
The team responsible for onboarding exists, as evidenced with the continuing evolution of the onboarding process within the product, such as the examples provided above, along with the web site and other external communications. Indeed, even the pricing, though some complain about the frequency of change, has those changes as a direct result of ongoing engagement with current and prospective users.
This isn't to say that what we have today is the best it can possibly be. On the contrary, it merely evidences an ongoing commitment to continual improvement, where improvement becomes concrete goals assessed for tangible results. Everything can always be improved.
As Community Liaison, part of my role is to help steward input from the community for improvement of the product experience.
Where such guidance is provided in specific actionable terms, I remain committed to doing so.
By way of example:
From time to time over the years we've seen suggestions like "The web site should be better", but rarely specifying what "better" means.
As a fellow business owner, to me "better" means moving more visitors through the funnel with the least friction possible. So talking with prospective users in a sort of mini-study, and comparing that with research on programming language adoption and technology adoption in general, we find a key emotional component with getting a potential new user's attention, which we could summarize as "Who's using this, and what are they building with it?"
I worked with Steven Crighton, LC's Marketing Manager, to provide input on what is now the "Customer Stories" section of the site. And to make it as visible as it merits, it was moved to the primary navigation, currently the second link in the site's header.
But I felt it would be even more useful to find a way to provide comforting reassurance of real-world use across the site, on as many pages as possible, yet in ways that don't distract from each page's purpose. After discussing this with Steven, for quite a while now you'll see that most pages on the site include a quote from a member of our community who's used LiveCode to deliver products. So throughout the experience of using the site to learn more, visitors get a sense of real people getting real work done powerfully with LiveCode.
"Make it better" is not actionable.
"Add a customer quote to each page" is actionable.
"Make the customer stories more visible" is not actionable.
"Move the customer stories link to the top of the taxonomy, as far to the left in the main menu as practical" is actionable.
As a second example, I have time schedule at the conference with Mark Waddingham to explore options for enhancing community engagement. Of course, scheduling a meeting is a small effort, but it's a very specific one, a practical step that contributes to the process of continued improvement.
I enjoy this sort of volunteer work, because when things align it produces useful, tangible results.
I'm happy to help others do the same. Let's create a thread for specific proposals, flesh them out, and present them.
