Today the king of media is not the tv anymore, it is the web and the people who use it.

Online communities can give you feedback, suggestions about your new product or technology, an important point of view to use as base for your future decisions.

This is the job I am looking for.

Generally, I think engineering is the probably the better organization for community managers to live. However, I have seen great community people in marketing and really bad community people in engineering. It just depends on the individuals involved. But I was talking to the MySQL guys after Sun bought them a while back, and they said that their community building operations reported separately to executive management because community building is not marketing and it`s not engineering: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/mysql_meeting_at_sun_japan. Who knows.

I have a love-hate relationship with the title Community Manager. I was the first CM on the OpenSolaris project five years ago, but three years ago I gave up the title and no one else has taken it (which surprises me, actually). I liked it initially when we were small, but as we grew I felt more and more uncomfortable with it. I didnt like how many people felt I was the center of everything "community" (the good and the bad!) when in reality I couldnt know everything going on around the world nor could I influence everything. Perhaps thats just how the term is viewed at Sun, I dont know, but my impression is that great community management is based on great project management. And thats what I have done in several fields -- manage projects. On OpenSolaris, I manage community development projects with engineers inside and outside of Sun as well as general users in various regions and partners and customers and whoever else happens to come by. But many other people build community, too, by simply participating in their projects in the open. Ive always felt the task of building community should be distributed widely among everyone involved in the greater effort. If you are an engineer or a marketing or services person and you are working in the open and engaging non-Sun people, then you are helping to build community.

Keep in mind that my perspective on this issue comes from working on OpenSolaris, which is a project we are opening from the inside of a very large company. So, although the code is out there, that code took two years to open, and we are still opening infrastructure to support open development, which is certainly taking place but its been a bit on the slow side. So, we are in a constant state /opening/, and thats why I feel that everyone has to do his or her part and build community as they move their projects (code, infrastructure, processes, people) across the firewall. That has been the biggest challenge on the project, and that has shaped my view of what a Community Manager is. At least on this project anyway.