Community Constitution
- Thread starter Steve
- Start date
Why don't you give your opinions then instead of complaining about people that complain.
No one knows your opinion if you don't give it.
Not having a pop, just an observation
No one knows your opinion if you don't give it.
Not having a pop, just an observation
I was sent to Japan with a remit of "make sure they don't fnck it up". I was getting paid just under $1000 a day to do that & this was when $1000 was a lot of money.
I remember sitting in a meeting with 15 guys (including me) in Toyama and 3 guys in Kawasaki. This was a satellite video conference and that was pricey as the internet couldn't support such things then.
We were discussing nothing more complex than the design of a sales order change history module. Simply put, someone buys something, they change their mind and you need to track that as you are a huge Japanese manufacturer and these things have ripples.
Day 1 ended - no further forward - 10 hours, 18 people
Day 2 - couldn't jusify the cost of the video conference, another 10 hours, 15 people
Day 3 started....
Sasazu - "Peter San - you are here to help. We aren't getting anywhere. Do you have any ideas?"
Me - "Yes, you have too many people in the room. I suggest having 2 people create a design, then if you want we can all come back and take a look at it and approve it or not. So I am now going to leave the meeting. I suggest others do the same".
I left, 5 Philippinos left. All the Japanese stayed behind. Culturally, none of them could leave the meeting but they could have smaller meetings next time, which they did.
So - my opinion is not going to help because having more diverse opinions won't help. I am biased as I am a vendor. Others are biased because they have a stick up their ar$e about T2W.
At the end of the day, the forum-member relationship is similar to a supplier-customer relationship. As much as suppliers might want to blow smoke up the ar$es of their customers, they are there to extract as much $$$$ from their customers without disenfranchising them.
Some customers are difficult. In my experience it is the smaller customers that whine the most. Say you sell software for $100k. A multi-billion dollar company will buy it & you might get a few support requests. A small Million dollar company will be calling you up ever other damn day expecting you to read the bloody manual for them. This is just the way it is. Those little customers are OK but you don't base your business around them just because they are the squeaky wheel.
T2W is a business. It needs direction. No-one is really going to buy into any kumbaya nonsense that the members come first. The members will come first as long as this is in line with what makes the business grow. If not, it'll go the way of the Twinkie.
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Likes:
kimo'sabby
So I take it you aren't an advocate of Soft Systems Methodology being used for software analysis and design
Im fully in agreement that you can't take decisions by committee, but you can, and should try to make yourself aware of the issues, and consultation is a reasonable course of action. However, I honestly don't think members should play a part in that consultation, for the reasons you highlighted. the dog should be wagging the tail, not the other way around.
I honestly don't believe t2w currently has direction, and that's their problem.
Im fully in agreement that you can't take decisions by committee, but you can, and should try to make yourself aware of the issues, and consultation is a reasonable course of action. However, I honestly don't think members should play a part in that consultation, for the reasons you highlighted. the dog should be wagging the tail, not the other way around.
I honestly don't believe t2w currently has direction, and that's their problem.
DT - fair points.
I can't really say I disagree with that at all.
I know where you're coming from, they should know what direction
they want to move in essentially, and know how to initiate that change.
None of my posts bar one, have actually mentioned transforming T2W
as a business, apart from one minor idea about outsourcing article content
in exchange for free advertising.
All my other posts are about basic site mechanics pretty much.
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/search.php?searchid=10571654&pp=25
Thats all I am talking about, basic site ideas that affect user experience,
not business direction, so in that sense I agree with you.
I can't really say I disagree with that at all.
I know where you're coming from, they should know what direction
they want to move in essentially, and know how to initiate that change.
None of my posts bar one, have actually mentioned transforming T2W
as a business, apart from one minor idea about outsourcing article content
in exchange for free advertising.
All my other posts are about basic site mechanics pretty much.
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/search.php?searchid=10571654&pp=25
Thats all I am talking about, basic site ideas that affect user experience,
not business direction, so in that sense I agree with you.
Likes:
DionysusToast
WTF are you talking about..?? I just wanted to bump the thread to see if I could get a response from Steve
Likes:
Liquid validity
WTF are you talking about..?? I just wanted to bump the thread to see if I could get a response from Steve
Now I will be the first to agree that this sounds like the classic 'cheque's in the post' response but I intend to look into all the suggestions and find out if they can be done and if there is merit in doing them.
This loop will be closed and you'll get an answer one way or another when I have finished looking into them.
Thanks again.
Steve
Thanks to DT and LV for the recent posts. LV puts it very well in the closing words of the post:
"Thats all I am talking about, basic site ideas that affect user experience,
not business direction"
These have been mixed up here for too long. Regardless of the direction I take T2W in, there is an immediate responsibility to the community to fix things that need fixing and that have been neglected for too long. These are the things that many would argue are independant of what the overall operation is doing. Many members have confirmed directly to me that they are not really bothered about this wider picture as long as the forum stuff works for them.
These are the things that irritate people and that need sorting out so they want to stay rather than go. I'm already starting to fix some of these and will continue to do so. I'll also continue to ask for help and guidance because that's how communities work. As Barjon rightly pointed out it is called consultation and it certainly is not weakness or a lack of direction.
The business side of things has become far too embroiled with the community for reasons that have been debated long and hard here and I don't intend to start that all over again. This has led to the situation where the whole organisation, it's management, strategic plans and so forth have been open house for commentary and speculation. I know of no other community of this nature where this happens to the same extent.
On Pistonheads they talk about cars, on Mumsnet they talk about mumsnet stuff, on Money Saving Expert they talk about saving money etc etc. On T2W the focus should be talk about trading with a smattering of this other stuff from those who always feel obliged to post it not the other way around.
As far as I am concerned there are two clear aspects to the whole T2W operation, i'll call them community and commercial. The community side of things is pretty obvious and that is what much of the CEO exchange has been about. Sorting stuff out that impacts on the community directly and that will make it a better place to be. If we achieve this we should increase our numbers and therefore generate the revenue required to keep the whole thing running.
I have an extremely long list of things I want to action in this area. Each one is important and will make a difference but there are only so many hours in a day and resources to make them happen.
I'll happily share any of these if you are interested. And your responses to this thread will be added to them for consideration, of that you can be assured. there will be no more 'i'll look into it' never to be heard of again and if there is any evidence of this i'll expect you to tell me.
What I will not be doing because it is inappropriate and it is not up to everyone out there to tell me what I should be doing, is posting regularly about the decisions I am making that are not directly about the community. I'll obviously keep everyone posted through the CEO forum but i''ll be the one to decide between consultation and advice of implementation. If every single thing was posted and discussed we would never get anything done and people would quite understandably get fed up with it.
So what of the commercial? I have already said that we did some things that, with hindsight were not right and the whole vendor thing has been well aired without me rattling on about it again here.
So i'm not rushing into anything here. I have already said that I want the commercial side to link positively with the community and I really can't see why this will not work. I think we have a golden opportunity to become an extremely useful resource and providing a whole range of trading related services to both members and non members.
I use the word commercial not necessarily in the money making sense but within the context of our wider relationships, ie we have member relationships and we have commercial relationships. We need to turn these to our members advantage (product discounts, information access for example) and to our advantage (member only offers so people join, get more involved and revenue increases as a result).
So future vistors will have three choices, they can ignore all the resources stuff and go straight to the community (just as people never see the home page now), they can do their community stuff and take a look at the other services or they can just use what is there and ignore the community completely, their choice.
So yes, at the base level this is a supplier - customer relationship but I really can't see why the two cannot be mutually supportive and that's the broad direction I'm heading in.
This all takes time, much of what I intend to do is very significant and moving a business with over ten years of experience in a different (and clear) direction is never an easy ride.
But who wants that, there's no fun in that at all!
So there will no doubt be setbacks and directional changes within the overall plan but I'm in it for the long haul and will do what it takes to get things where I want them to be.
"Thats all I am talking about, basic site ideas that affect user experience,
not business direction"
These have been mixed up here for too long. Regardless of the direction I take T2W in, there is an immediate responsibility to the community to fix things that need fixing and that have been neglected for too long. These are the things that many would argue are independant of what the overall operation is doing. Many members have confirmed directly to me that they are not really bothered about this wider picture as long as the forum stuff works for them.
These are the things that irritate people and that need sorting out so they want to stay rather than go. I'm already starting to fix some of these and will continue to do so. I'll also continue to ask for help and guidance because that's how communities work. As Barjon rightly pointed out it is called consultation and it certainly is not weakness or a lack of direction.
The business side of things has become far too embroiled with the community for reasons that have been debated long and hard here and I don't intend to start that all over again. This has led to the situation where the whole organisation, it's management, strategic plans and so forth have been open house for commentary and speculation. I know of no other community of this nature where this happens to the same extent.
On Pistonheads they talk about cars, on Mumsnet they talk about mumsnet stuff, on Money Saving Expert they talk about saving money etc etc. On T2W the focus should be talk about trading with a smattering of this other stuff from those who always feel obliged to post it not the other way around.
As far as I am concerned there are two clear aspects to the whole T2W operation, i'll call them community and commercial. The community side of things is pretty obvious and that is what much of the CEO exchange has been about. Sorting stuff out that impacts on the community directly and that will make it a better place to be. If we achieve this we should increase our numbers and therefore generate the revenue required to keep the whole thing running.
I have an extremely long list of things I want to action in this area. Each one is important and will make a difference but there are only so many hours in a day and resources to make them happen.
I'll happily share any of these if you are interested. And your responses to this thread will be added to them for consideration, of that you can be assured. there will be no more 'i'll look into it' never to be heard of again and if there is any evidence of this i'll expect you to tell me.
What I will not be doing because it is inappropriate and it is not up to everyone out there to tell me what I should be doing, is posting regularly about the decisions I am making that are not directly about the community. I'll obviously keep everyone posted through the CEO forum but i''ll be the one to decide between consultation and advice of implementation. If every single thing was posted and discussed we would never get anything done and people would quite understandably get fed up with it.
So what of the commercial? I have already said that we did some things that, with hindsight were not right and the whole vendor thing has been well aired without me rattling on about it again here.
So i'm not rushing into anything here. I have already said that I want the commercial side to link positively with the community and I really can't see why this will not work. I think we have a golden opportunity to become an extremely useful resource and providing a whole range of trading related services to both members and non members.
I use the word commercial not necessarily in the money making sense but within the context of our wider relationships, ie we have member relationships and we have commercial relationships. We need to turn these to our members advantage (product discounts, information access for example) and to our advantage (member only offers so people join, get more involved and revenue increases as a result).
So future vistors will have three choices, they can ignore all the resources stuff and go straight to the community (just as people never see the home page now), they can do their community stuff and take a look at the other services or they can just use what is there and ignore the community completely, their choice.
So yes, at the base level this is a supplier - customer relationship but I really can't see why the two cannot be mutually supportive and that's the broad direction I'm heading in.
This all takes time, much of what I intend to do is very significant and moving a business with over ten years of experience in a different (and clear) direction is never an easy ride.
But who wants that, there's no fun in that at all!
So there will no doubt be setbacks and directional changes within the overall plan but I'm in it for the long haul and will do what it takes to get things where I want them to be.
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