On 2 January 2018 at 07:51, Dan Book <grinnz@gmail.com> wrote: > While I agree with your premise, as I have before, the specifics are more > difficult than that. Unlike most normal businesses, we don't have a way of > observing what our 'customers' do, at least not in a straightforward manner, > other than looking at what's on CPAN and at end-user applications that > actually get popular. So while the calls for involving the greater community > and less isolation in the mailing list are great, they don't mean much > unless someone has ideas on how this can be done. blogs.perl.org and similar > platforms are a start, but the core issue is that the users of Perl are > highly disjointed across various disciplines and practices which do not all > (or even mostly) sit in the same community forum. > > -Dan > My point was not so much that we "need more customer engagement", as much as that would be nice, its obviously hard to wrangle. The point was more that *BECAUSE* we have a customer engagement problem, we should not be using this engagement as our fundamental driver. The approach of "If you didn't like it, then you should have said something on P5P" is just making this exact expectation. We should be *proactively* thinking about our customers so that it doesn't necessitate this engagement. Because even in a business, you can't tell what your customers /think/ of what you do, you can only tell what they do *in your business*. When your customers think you did a crap job, they're more likely to just stop coming, and you won't realise they're gone. They're more likely to tell their friends you did a crap job, and their friends will stop coming. You have to proactively consider this and make steps not to alienate them, because the assumption that they'll tell you when they're not happy is a fundamental error. -- Kent KENTNL - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNLThread Previous | Thread Next