"A Festivus for the Rest of Us"; Sandy Examines the True Meaning of Community

Sandy looked up community on Wikipedia.  Then she questioned whether Feedback Driven Development is community...

"So when you look at the activities p&p is doing, are they really “community”? Certainly the group of customers that we are trying to impact can be called a community simply by their sense of “collectivity”. But when we are trying to create patterns & practices through a technique I call “Feedback-Driven Development”, I think we are stretching the definition. With the Feedback-Driven Development, we provide an explicit and published process to the community for the development of p&p projects and customers to participate in the development process while setting expectations about working with p&p. Through this effort, we can provide a history of traceable decisions to increase the value and impact of what we produce. "

If the feedback from the community is listened to and the resulting product given to the community of customers has been improved through the collaborative efforts... I would say it is a community.  This is more true if all the feedback happens in the open where every contributor could build off of each others feedback. Likewise... betaplace is not a community, but Ladybug is and could be even more than it is today. 

"Even the Visual Studio Community Technology Preview (CTP) seems like a misnomer. "

I always thought this was the title because we are giving the bits to a community. So it's a tech preview for the community of developers. 

Regardless, I'm glad that people are doing this sort of introspection about what it really means to interact and participate in the community of our product users.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  December 16, 2004
  False !
  LadyBug is the disaster for Microsoft. Most of time people use it to report own problems.
  
  Only a few people realy care to answer on somebody else feedback.
  This way LadyBug is no way different from BetaPlace. It can not be called "community" by your definitions.
  
  I believe that in the past there were very strong communities of people who were involved at pre-release stages of product developments.
  As well there are strong communities for Microsoft products after their release.
  
  By my definition - community is the group of people who "communicate". They can communicate in different ways user -> company (one way), user <-> company (two way) or user <-> user.
  Either way it will be community. And all thouse kinds of communications must be possible.
  
  I'm very disapointed that there is no way to submit a reports on Product Feedback under NDA :-( Read FDBK10072
  http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=FDBK10072
  You are trying to build user<->user communication channel at cost of user->company one. I believe that this is not good :-(
  
• Anonymous
  December 16, 2004
  I'll dissagree AT. Ladybug is a community that collaborates. I know this because there is a LOT of evidence to show that users are taking advantage of the voting/"me too" feature that the site offers. This is collaboration that helps the community prioritize requests and issues in a way that can't be done on betaplace.