As you say, no reason is compelling without it working.

I’m more interested in the process and the challenges and HOW you solve problems than the product itself. Seeing your process unfolds helps me decide whether I can trust you or not — that’s the point of transparency. If I can’t see into your decision making, how can I trust you? And, when others are *far* more open, why would I bother waiting to hear from you? You require far too much effort to just get a basic sense for where things are at.

Your open community is your most valuable partner; that we have no insight into what’s going on and what changes are being made makes us feel jaded. You might think that you’re respecting your commercial partners by not being open about what’s going on but you’re shunning your most valuable asset. How long do you think we’ll really stick around if you constantly put your commercial partners’ interests first?

I’m hesitantly optimistic about the current Flock Beta process. I’d like to see some deadlines and a bi-weekly release schedule. I’d like to see you turning mailing list feedback into bugs with Bugzilla IDs. I’d like to see you collate and blog about all the mockups and screenshots I and others will be providing you. Most importantly, I want to see the browser really improve over this beta process — and that means ripping shit out if it’s not working.

So, ball’s in your court. I await to be impressed.

-E

As always, I appreciate your investment in Flock and the Flock community. I owe you a beer for all the ideas/emotions/changes you’ve stirred up over the last few months. I would like to address a few things you mentioned:

-Regarding Transparency. Having just come back from the Online Community Unconference, I can tell you that this is a problem across many companies. How does a company be transparent without A) sabotaging themselves and B) boring people to death?

Part A is easier to solve…Flock keeps partner-related developments somewhat private in respect to our partners. Everything else, once it’s more than a random pipe dream, is communicated on the wiki (not perfectly, but we try). I think it’s important to not post the random pipe dreams, because a lot of the negativity that has been directed towards Flock is due to the lack of delivery of ideas that we broadcast early on that were just that…ideas.

Part B (with some crossover to Part A) is a lot harder. Don’t get me wrong: I agree that we’ve been far too silent for the last few months. I shoulder much of the blame for this, and feebly offer my recent movement into this position as an excuse. Some of the things we will be doing shortly are:
-Letting Flockstars test drive Flock 0.9 (though anyone can try out the daily builds if they’d like) and collecting/acting upon technical and non-technical feedback.
-Letting Flockstars preview the new Flock.com and soliciting feedback.
-Writing a series of blog posts comparing Cardinal and Cormorant.
-Publishing and maintaining a ~2 week schedule for Flock to let the community know what we’re up to.
-Maintaining our public wiki more regularly (we have just brought in a new Flocker who is in charge of keeping the wiki clean, usable, and pertinent).

These are great steps, but definitely not enough. However, I am going to put you and the rest of the community on the spot here: what do you want to know? Somehow I don’t think that most Flockstars want to know that today we designed a new play button to videos in the Media Minibar, reviewed some videos that will be on the new flock.com, had some birthday cake, talked about how we might fix a Mediamagic bug, and went home. If the community DOES want to know all of this, please tell us (I will continue to ask this question in a larger forum).

-Regarding Releases. I think it is imperative that we keep in mind that Flock of 6 months ago is not the same as Flock today. After getting acclimated at Flock, Shawn set very specific milestones for the product (I am aware that people would like to know what these are, and that will be part of our transparency policy as much as possible). Give or take a week or two, we’ve hit all of these. YES, Flock 0.8/0.9/1.0 were supposed to be out a long time ago. Nobody here is unaware of that: we’re all painfully aware. We hit growing pains, we floundered, but now we’re back on track. Shawn’s intention is to get us into a regular release cycle. There’s nothing we can do about the past. We can only change the future.

-Regarding Community-involved development. This is extremely important to everyone on the team, especially Shawn and I. However, I think there’s a distinction to be made between users, community, and Flockstars.

The Flockstars, our most visible and active community members, provide a lot of really helpful feedback, and I log every vote for features and services. These are all collected and used as one of the top factors in deciding which features and services to add to Flock. I mention this on the Suggestions forum or directly to users when I do this, but I realize this could be broadcast better.

Community is a larger group of Flock users who are perhaps not as much of the “culture”, even if they’re involved. These users are just as important as Flockstars.

Users are all the people using Flock (including the community and Flockstars). I would venture to bet that many people who use Flock never go to flock.com, email the flockstars mailing list, or come to meetups. These people are just as important as community and Flockstars. However, our work with them is less visible than our conversations on the blog, the forums, and the mailing lists.

I intend to write this all into a flock.com blog post soon, but we have several forms of feedback from Flock users.
-Every time we release an upgrade to 0.7, we poll a percentage of updaters. Past polls have included “what do and don’t you like about Flock?”, “What do you do online?” and “What social networking activities do you do online and which would you like to see in Flock?”.
-In contrast to these active Flock users, we also poll everyone uninstalling Flock and ask them why they are uninstalling. While we get a whole lot of bad words (I would know, I read every response), we also get a lot of feedback on why people are no longer using Flock. Bugs, usability problems, and more are found through these.
-I surf the blogosphere weekly and collect all negative and positive feedback regarding Flock. I respond to the majority of these posts and send a condensed collection of these posts to the staff. I hope to include some of this in a Flockstars newsletter that I’ve been cooking up.
-In addition to these activities, we have community test days (during which we document both technical and non-technical feedback), engage in conversations with the Flockstars on IRC, and respond to nearly all (I’d love to get rid of that nearly) posts on the blog and forums.

I’m not trying to toot my own (or Flock’s own) horn here, but I want to be clear about what Flock is doing. The fact that I had to write this response clearly shows that I am/we are not communicating these actions well enough to our community, and that is something that I am actively trying to change. All suggestions are welcome (I appreciate what you’ve suggested in the past).

With this new information, what would you (and the rest of the community) like to see more of? Like I mentioned before, I am not going to blog about every birthday party and bore everyone to death unless I am told that YES, Flockstars want to know about every birthday party. If they do, I will put all my energy into delivering that..I am their ambassador. Hell, if they want to, they can come. I will order an extra cake.

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

PS: I am aware that I did not discuss the issue of Open Source. As you’ve seen, lilmatt is very intent on pushing fixes upstream to Mozilla, and I am encouraged by the discussion that has grown around this. While I am involved in this work, I don’t feel qualified enough to wade into the issue.