Richard Esplin steps down as Head of Alfresco Community Relations

Things continue to be in flux at Alfresco with regards to how they manage their community. Today, Richard Esplin announced that he is stepping down as Head of Alfresco Community Relations to become a Product Manager for Alfresco Community Edition. In his blog post, Richard says that although his title changed a while back, his day-to-day job has still been mostly focused on the community, until now.

It sounds like rather than having a centralized team focused on managing the community, the various community touch points will be diffused throughout the organization.

Last month, Alfresco hired long-time community member, author, and former Ixxus employee, Martin Bergljung. I know through the grapevine there are more community hires on the way. These seem to be focused on “developer outreach” and “developer ecosystem” which is one aspect of community management.

I hope the “community is everyone’s job” approach does not lead to a “community is no one’s job” problem at Alfresco.

Related to Community Edition, Richard said, “I will be rethinking our approach to Alfresco Community Edition in order to make it a better product for its target audience”. My worry here is that there hasn’t always been agreement on what is the “target audience” for Alfresco Community Edition. In the past, Alfresco Software, Inc. has wanted the target audience to be developers who experiment and test out code that will ultimately become Enterprise Edition. The reality has been that many people want to run Community Edition in production–they want a high quality, free/libre open source software product that helps them solve document management problems.

Hopefully, Richard and the rest of the Alfresco team are aligned to the new reality of how Community Edition is being used.

It will definitely be interesting to see how these staffing shifts work out for the community.

16 comments

  1. Richard Esplin says:

    As always, you do a great job at articulating the reasonable concerns people might have with our strategy. I am looking forward at providing more explanation once I have finalized all the internal details.

    I do want to clarify that I don’t see my role change as a “stepping down” (which could have negative connotations). I am excited to focus on a key part of my previous role—the open source product and the open source community—and let other people worry about the other parts of the role. I have been working on this change for some time, and am glad to finally make it public.

    I look forward to working with you in the hack-a-thon on April 17.

    Richard Esplin
    Product Manager, Alfresco Community Edition

  2. Jeff Potts says:

    Good point, Richard. I meant “stepping down” in the general sense of “doing something else”, not to characterize the relative value of your new position compared to the old.

    I know Product Management has been an interest for you for a long time so I’m really excited that you’re getting a chance to pursue it at Alfresco and Thomas DeDemo is lucky to have you.

    Jeff

  3. Pingback: Alfresco's Community Mindset changing? - CONTENTREICH
  4. Pingback: The plain truth about Alfresco’s open source ethos | ECM Architect

Comments are closed.