Consumer Considerations
[DANGER: This post is just a few related ideas jotted down. It's not going to make all that much sense probably].
I’ve just watched a talk by Garry Vaynerchuck on the “Thank You Economy”[1] , which is his vision of where business is going currently. It primarily talks about consumer consideration, emotional engagement and building a relationship with customers over social networks. Normally I don’t pay attention to a lot of the capitalist crap that gets thrown around since I don’t believe in that kind of system.
Whilst I was watching the talk my mind wandered to Open Source Software and it seems that this kind of topic is fairly relevant since the main criticism of Open Source Software is the lack of professional support.
In some ways the FOSS community is similar to these businesses in that they add value to the products themselves and emotional engagement is a given, we’ve all seen the ranting freetard in a forum 
. I think this side of a community can be a cause for concern and has pushed people away in the past. In a world where we all want to belong to some culture or club it can be difficult to find somewhere to belong and this is even more important in an economy that is trying to embrace this kind of human behaviour. I don’t agree 100% with the idea of emotional engagement and the kind of things they are proposing are a bit creepy, I don’t really want an emotional connection with the guy who sold me my computer monitor, I just want to buy the device. There is a fine balance to this kind of thing and I think we are going to feel the hurt from them making mistakes for a while.
FOSS could benefit from this kind of system a bit more if there was a more formalised method of user embrace, a lot of the communication between various groups is pretty sketchy at times and whilst forums are alive with discussion, mailing lists can have a high barrier for entry and are hard to consume easily, you either have a massive amount of email dumped on you at once or you get a stream of emails throughout the day. Social Networks are a more natural way for us to communicate, Twitters success is a testament to that and I think everyone knows it. I think a lot of FOSS projects have taken to Social Networks well when they need to engage with users but there is still the ranting freetard, frothing at the mouth and waiting to insult someone in a post. I use the term freetard with a purpose, I don’t want to disrespect anyone but when I see these people I think they’re pathetic examples of elitism and every aspect of life would be better without them. I’ve been called innumerable insults for using Ubuntu as a Linux Distro, I’ve been insulted for owning Macs and I’ve been insulted for not knowing language X. Human nature is one of like-minded segregation, we want to feel like we belong to a group, an individual sect that is filled with similar people. We polarise ourselves in an attempt to fit in and I think that this is really dangerous to all FOSS communities. Freetards are an example of this segregation and they seem to think that they are better than other people or at least they have more experience so are more deserving of respect. In my opinion anyone that insults someone for what they choose is probably not worthy of respect (and as someone that trolls IRC sometimes, I know what I’m talking about). A discussion is not insults, it is logical discourse and I think a lot of the people I’ve seen forget this fact.
In my opinion a lot of projects would benefit from the following: More consistent community embracement, More accessible documentation (I’ll write another post about this one) and constant attempts to stop the community from polarising. Jono Bacon wrote a good post about this [2] and I think respect is an important aspect to the community. The ideas of a “Thank You Economy” are designed to make businesses get even more user data that they can exploit and to fake an emotional connection but as with everything I think some of the lessons is teaches can be used for the benefit of the Open Source community too!.
[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWN8WdKgerA – Keynote Video
[2] - http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/11/05/making-our-world-more-respectful/ – Jono Bacons blog post about community respect.
