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title: Community Gardening

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# Community Gardening

Several weeks ago, my friend and colleague Kashyap Chamarthy posted an essay titled What makes an effective open-source "community gardener?"
By "community gardener," he means what most of us traditionally have called a "community manager".
I liked his choice of terminology, though, as I've written before about how difficult it is to even define what a community amnager does, let alone the right thing to call it.

A "gardener" metaphor is good, because a community needs nurturing, weeding and pruning at times, watering, light, and so on.
But also, the implication that it can become overgrown with weeds without a gardener isn't particularly charitable to the community members.
Community organizers and liaisons and leaders all suffer from different problems, too, because the community does a lot of these functions on its own.

Names are hard.

## Openness and secrets

Kashyap says in his essay, "Don't let your insider advantage seep through into your public communication."
Full-time community managers often have access to information before the public upstream community.
It's just part of their position inside a sponsoring company.
This is especially true if projects that are led, or controlled, or overwhelmingly dominated by, a particular company, which is increasingly the case with large open source projects these days.
Often, one is prohibited, for one reason or another, from sharing insider information with the upstream community, which can be an enormous source of stress.

Imagine being told that I know a thing that would make your life easier, or, at least, help you to plan your future better.
But I'm not allowed to tell you, for reasons that I'm probably also not able or allowed to explain to you.

This is simply the nature of working for a company.
Some things are secret.

As a (hopefully!) trusted member of the community, it can be a difficult balance to strike, and can frequently give the community the impression (perhaps justified) that "I know something you don't, and am intentionally withholding that information."
That can become even more problematic once the information is finally revealed, along with the fact that I've known for some time.

On the flip side of this, if a message is made public too early, before it is "polished", you end up with situations where you don't have all of the answers to the questions you know will be asked.
This makes you look unprofessional, unprepared, and dismissive of the concerns of the community.

This is then further complicated by the community saying that you should have just had the entire conversation in public to start with. Which has merit, certainly.
But, again, companies have secrets, because we have shareholders, intellectual property, lawyers, trade secrets, and so on.
And there will always be things that are not spoken of "outside."

One of the Red Hat mantras is "upstream first", which speaks not only of where we put code (developed in the upstream community first) but where we have conversations (on the public mailing list, forum, chat, etc.). The tension between wanting to do this (and the benefits that derive from that) and the need to keep things embargoed (for reasons of insider trading, security embargoes, and trade secrets) is a constant presence in all companies that deal with open source.


## Gardening

There are many ways to manage.
There are fewer ways to garden.
A community gardener helps projects and people who have come together for a common purpose flourish.
What actions that demands on a day-to-day basis varies depending upon what a community needs.
Openness and transparency are required for an open community, although the degree to which one can be fully transparent is going to vary from one company to another.
That tension is always going to be there.
Being aware of that tension, and carefully considering it in your external communications, is essential.
There are no easy glib answers to what you can and should say, but, rather, always be aware that it's a choice, and make that choice mindfully.
No matter what, be open and honest that you're not able to communicate everything, and look to cultivate a trusting community with an atmosphere of honesty.
Trust that your community accepts that you cannot answer some quesiotns, or divulge all the information you have, and you will form healthy and vibrant communities.
