Banned... No good deed goes unpunished

This is one of my favorites from a couple of months ago: airing dirty laundry unprofessionally for no particular good reason I can see: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1901

I'm not sure why RPF have difficulty apologizing or taking responsibility for the launch issues.  These people are partners with RS and Farnell and they are all tarred with the same brush.  Outsourcing doesn't outsource responsibility, if anything, it makes more because you have to manage the relationship as well as the indirect expectations.  Obviously they are learning all these things, but their responsiveness to the inquiries shows that they aren't learning much about PR.

I think that between the original launch availability fiasco and their handling of a lot of questions I see in the forums that there just isn't a very good PR mindset there.  They get a lot of pushback along the lines of "this won't work in education because...", "this isn't open enough because...".  And the answers to a lot of those are simply - "this platform isn't for you, sorry" or 'at this price, we cannot do that".  Such questions are not necessarily relevant or important to allow on the Raspberry Pi Foundation forums, but nevertheless, in order to keep a positive image you have to respond politely and patiently and reiterate the foundation's mission and target.  I just don't think that's something in their DNA right now, and in the non-profit sector, perhaps that might be a hindrance to them in the future.  Note that they are in a space which is highly competitive and worth a great deal of money.

Look at OLPC and the heavy tech investment with smart boards in classrooms.  I've even seen some schools with iPads for every kids and MacBooks in carts.  Right now, they have trouble keeping up with hobbyist demands, but the educational market beyond people selling kits one by one is going to be extremely tough to break into and this is where a lot of the workload is actually going to be shouldered by partners like adafruit and the distro groups who are independent of the foundation.  And these groups might favor other hardware if they don't get information they need or a more stable hardware platform.  In particular, the fact that they do advertise a $25 product which doesn't actually exist and a $35 product which does have limitations for many environments which have to be augmented out of the box.  We're coming up on a Christmas where the $100 tablets are going to be far more capable than they were last year, and given they include a screen and storage and controls (on-screen), you have to think of things like the Nexus 7 as being direct competitors which start to get closer in price (for what you get - $199 vs $35 + mouse + keyboard + power supply + screen + SD card).  There have been a number of issues recently since the overclocking became an "official" setting and I assume the Rev 2 board is meant to address a number of other issues before they need to meet and support a volume of real education orders.

I also think that forums aren't a great place for technical questions now that we have far better tools.  Since 2008 we have known that the #1 site on the Internet for programming Q&A is far and away StackOverflow http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com (SO) and there is a Raspberry Pi StackExchange (SE) in Beta http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/ which does get pretty good traffic.  RPF have actively discouraged people from leaving their forums for technical Q&A.  This is amazing to me because SO/SE is pretty much acknowledged by professional and hobbyist programmers alike to be THE place for peer-validated and reliable knowledge exchange.  This is because search traffic drives users to SO/SE because their SEO is so optimized and they have been working on making Q&A better for 4 years now - not just trying to do Q&A in the old forum paradgim.

StackExchange is great for Q&A and not so much for other community aspects, which is where forums can come in.  StackExchanges do great SEO and in my experience, the moderation there is appropriate for the Q&A environment.  As far as community chitchat, I find the foundation's forums (and even these forums) hard to follow for all the same reasons forums aren't working for Q&A, so I tend to avoid them except where I pick up something useful via RSS - which is usually a link to a blog article or online product/store.

*reads that post*  Ohhhh, NutjobGate! That was entertaining... for about 2 minutes then just seemed a bit... juvenile.

In answer to the previous post - yeah, I just basically told him not to be so bloody sarcastic. This was before the topic was locked, though. Oh, I've decided I don't care. Couple of other forums with knowledgeable people on them, so there is choice at least!

Michael Horne wrote:

 

*reads that post*  Ohhhh, NutjobGate! That was entertaining... for about 2 minutes then just seemed a bit... juvenile.

 

In answer to the previous post - yeah, I just basically told him not to be so bloody sarcastic. This was before the topic was locked, though. Oh, I've decided I don't care. Couple of other forums with knowledgeable people on them, so there is choice at least!

Oh... huh, that's a little different then the way you presented it.  You mouthed off to a mod and got banned I'm not sure what else to expect.  Not saying you deserved it or that the mod wasn't being out of line, but that's just common forum sense.  But like you said, no reason to care about it, it eventually happens to us all! 

side note, my e-mail suddenly got a deludge of comments from nlarson whose profile says she actually works for e14, but none of her posts are in this thread, did a mod's posts get removed?

I got a load, too, Jim.

Sorry for the confusion.  This is due to a bug with our email alerts system.  When an admin user releases a post from the moderation queue, an email update will incorrectly be sent which portrays the admin user as the author of the post.  If you view the post referenced in the email, then you will see the actual author.

Thanks,

Drew

thanks for the clarification!  I thought that was weird.

thanks for the clarification!  I thought that was weird.