The Store : Observations from the first week after the release.
In order to start this post I want to take a big step back first talk about communities.
Communities, at the base level, really boil down to social interactions of organisms with each other. These organisms coexist in a society. Societies can be thought of people that are related to each other, that share common expectations and/or authority.
Seems simple enough, right?
If we dig a bit deeper into the social interactions of organisms we can begin to get an idea that there are a variety of types of people – as defined by their behaviour. Typically there are 4 types that really stick out, at least for me.
- Socializers
- This is the biggest group of any community. Usually about 80% of the population.
- They are seeking light-weight, non-confrontational easy to reciprocate social interactions with other people.
- Achievers
- These folks go to great lengths to achieve rewards simple for the prestige of having it.
- Explorers
- They are involved in the community for the social credit of having discovered something. They love to discover an unknown glitch or a hidden Easter egg.
- Killers
- These types thrive on competition with others in the community, in order to win and their expense.
Think of each community you belong to and what type of behaviour you typically exhibit. How your actions/interactions impact the overall state of the community. What is your typical tone within those communities. Also, are you typically a positive person or do you “bring the hammer” with negativity? Maybe your a realist?
No matter your behaviour type and the tone you use, you do impact the community.
So why all the preamble?
Its important to understand the nature of our community - DotNetNuke and the smaller/sub community of The Store. As, essentially, the “authority” for The Store we must keep our eyes and ears open to all input from the community. We must adapt and change with the “expectations” of our community. We must learn from each other. The very second we stop listening to the community (to you) we all lose.
While doing so we are sensitive to the fact that there will always be those people that are very positive – they are looking out for the community and want to see it foster and grow; and then there are the negative types. I would almost always agree that they too are looking out for the greater good of the community they just express themselves in a slightly different manner.
You must develop a pretty thick skin for those that exhibit a very high level of negativity about any change (good or bad) within the community – after we all cant put our biggest smile on every day, right?
Both of those types serve a huge purpose for the Community and do play an essential role to our collective success.
In this past week, since we launched what we are calling version 2 (v2.0) of The Store we have directly come into contact with pretty much every type of personality out there: Socializers, Achievers, Killers, Positive types, negative types, etc.. Everyone is coming out of the woodworks…
This is awesome!
The most encouraging thing for us right now is that feedback. Have confidence that we are tracking all items and triaging/fixing the high priority issues as soon as humanly possible. Gemini (bug tracker) and TFS (source control) are very active with frequent changes. We are doing our best to keep on top of the list and publishing to production as soon as it makes sense. Based on twitter there are many of you out there that have directly experienced the fast turn around we strive for, we will do our best to keep that pace going.
Right now, the best way for us to receive feedback is to either email us at store [at] dnncorp [dot] com, or by using our Help Desk.
We need you to communicate, no matter your style - keep it coming!