There has been progress on getting the rest of the company involved, but we’re not done yet. Developers at Flock have started to get more involved in community activities: we’ve had devs at tech conferences, more blogging, and attending meetups in the Bay Area. But with our sprint to 1.0 and the natural tendency of developers to want to write code (what is with that?), improvement has been incremental. I’m all ears for ideas about how we can get the developers more involved so that we’re ready to grow a bigger dev community when 1.0 launches.

To try and close the gap between community wisdom and company wisdom we’ve been using the community more and more for feedback, and will continue to do so even more. Asking questions and doing surveys have been the most valuable activities we’ve engaged the community in yet.

I think the problem right now is that there has been no step by step plan for how to participate in the Flock community, no “how to be a Flockstar” guide if you will. We need to give new folks an easy way to help grow the community; both getting more out of it and giving more back. I’m formulating my ideas on this right now, so please bear with me while I plan a bit.

I enjoyed lunch with my friend and former boss Clayton Stark on Monday. What a fantastic, insightful individual. During lunch I realized that Flock’s Victoria offices should contribute to Flock being able to fend off its kryptonite.

As Flock wor…

I don’t think most team members “use most features, most days”, otherwise a number of the bugs in the product would be considered unacceptable by the team and been resolved by now. This also relates to #2 and the Flock team is too detached from addressing their customer’s current problems for #1 to be true. Developers are developers and we like to focus on building the next thing.

I also think that with #1 it would have meant fewer, but better features in Flock today.

Flock can be incredibly successful if it applies web service (Web 2.0) responsiveness to desktop application service. This reminds me of an old podcast where Roland Tanglao said something like, Flock needed to develop in Flickr time. I see Microsoft, Apple and many others in the desktop space developing and deploying applications in a faster, more iterative manner.

At least four of the people that worked to address #1 have left: Bart, Messina, Vera, and myself. And Eli Goldberg has left and he has an amazing ability at finding user experience problems in features regardless of whether he uses them

Jesse is very passionate about this and makes a lot of personal sacrifices to work on it, but it is a whole team affair. If the team is not passionate about the features, they are working on the wrong product. There are other team members that are pretty good about it to, but not exceptional, and to have the greatest chance of successful, the whole team needs to be exceptional like you Daryl.

I can’t really think of a meaningful way to quantify being one’s most critical user. I do think we’ve tried to take steps to accept and integrate feedback, though that’s been largely within a closed loop (usability sessions with focus groups) rather than from a broader community perspective. Arguably, forming and listening to focus groups is one way of being a self-critical user. Lloyd, how would you propose quantifying how good or poor a job we’re doing at being self-critical? Does the bulk of our crew not use Flock as its primary browser? I do, and I suspect most of the executive crew at least does. If not, I agree that there’s a problem, though short of logging browser use internally, I don’t see a real way to quantify it.

I agree with your assessment about community. When I was trying to foster community in an official capacity, one of my biggest hopes was that I could browbeat the developers into engaging more. I had only very limited success. I learned during that time that community building is hard. I was trying to come up with initiatives and to build the infrastructure for them at the same time, and it was too much to take on, and our community didn’t take off. I think I did manage to engage on a pretty personal level with much of our active (irc/forum/list) community. My feeling of late is that I don’t really know what’s going on in terms of community. I know there are buttons that can be put on web sites now. And I know that messages occasionally appear in myspace or facebook and that there are plans for building better community rumbling under the surface. But I can imagine that those who aren’t active on myspace or facebook might wonder where what Flock ever had of community has gone. And even the myspace and facebook postings are rare and of limited use (“hey, use a button”). I don’t get the feeling there’s much of a personal connection between Flock and its community these days, and I think such a connection is critical to encouraging people to trust us and like us. As I noted before, community is a lot harder than it seems to maintain and foster, and I think we’re still trying to figure out where it fits into our vision. As during my reign as community shepherd, I think good intentions abound now with respect to community, but it’s just a hard nut to crack, and perhaps one we’ve been in only a limited position (see your point #3) to take on in earnest (as I proposed in my first comment). Whatever the case, I do hope we get this right, and sooner rather than later. If you have time and inclination sometime soon, I’d certainly be receptive to a more detailed analysis of some of the particular things you think we can do better w/r/t community.

Thank you for the comment. It has also been a great pleasure working with you.

Although Flock has had many successes in the last couple of months, I disagree with your assessment in each of these three areas, and would be interested in how you quantify those successes in #1 and #2.

Flock’s success becomes much less likely if it continues to go it alone (or only with privileged partners). It starts with communicating the path Flock will take over a release cycle, and then filling in the details as Flock develops them. No one expects the Flock team to have all the answers, and only by putting it out there will Flock take the best foot forward.

Although I think Flock may be successful without #3, it is not a process I want to be a part of as a community member. It would be too frustrating.