Broadcasts.com - "When Open Source Community Software is Bought by Private Equity" (Community Signal)

Business
RELATED

When Open Source Community Software is Bought by Private Equity

Published: June 24, 2024, 9:30 a.m.

When private equity buys online community platforms, who wins? What about if those platforms were built on open source software? Does the company continue to be a good citizen of the open source community that helped build the product?

History has shown us that it is often the community managers and pros who lose. They might not just lose a good platform though, they might lose their job.

Lincoln Russell\xa0has an interesting perspective on this topic. He joined Vanilla Forums, an open source community software platform, as a senior developer in 2011, having already used it for a couple of years. He left the company in 2020, then the director of engineering. Lincoln has continued to use the software. Vanilla Forums was subsequently purchased by Higher Logic, a company lacking a meaningful history of open source contributions.

As a matter of disclosure, both Higher Logic and Vanilla Forums are past sponsors of the show.

Lincoln and I also discuss:

How Vanilla Forums\u2019 open source ethos shifted over time
The importance of data migration standards for community software
Is community software best built by small businesses?

Big Quotes

Your community software provider must answer this (16:38):\xa0\u201cThe first question you should ask a [community software] vendor is: How easy is it to leave you? It\u2019s not a fun question to ask, but the answer is crucial to me. It\u2019s a deal-breaker question.\u201d -Patrick O\u2019Keefe

Some community platforms try to lock their customer data into the platform (18:07):\xa0\u201cWhen [a client is] onboarding [to new community software during the] initial year or two, they don\u2019t care about their data export. It\u2019s at the end. That\u2019s a long-term reputational issue about how people talk about their experiences. We saw that with [community software] competitors. We had some trouble with a couple of competitors in trying to get the data from them and spent way more hours than particular customers were worth \u2013 just on principle, honestly \u2013 getting the data out for them because we were so personally offended. At least I was.\u201d -Lincoln Russell

When you aren\u2019t selling community software to the people who will actually use it (20:37):\xa0\u201cIn the [community software] sales process, you identify stakeholders \u2013 people that are decision makers. A lot of the time they weren\u2019t a community manager. A lot of the time it was a director of technology, it was a CEO, or other positions, and that warps your roadmap.

\u201cWhen those are the people that [the] sales team [is] sitting in front of, day in and day out, and you\u2019re pitching an improved moderation queue, they want this button that does this thing. You\u2019re like, \u2018But that\u2019s stupid.\u2019 But it doesn\u2019t matter. If those are the people you\u2019re selling to, [with] their own idea of community that doesn\u2019t actually align with community management because they have internal business goals, and all they want to do are check those boxes.\u201d -Lincoln Russell

Why community professionals should drive community platform choice (22:10):\xa0\u201cAlthough I\u2019d like to believe, ego-wise, that I could make a community out of whatever piece of garbage application you throw in front of me, I know the software can either help me or hurt me, and it\u2019s tough when you\u2019re making dinner with someone else\u2019s ingredients.\u201d -Patrick O\u2019Keefe

Great ideas need great communicators (23:44):\xa0\u201cThe biggest issue with charting a course is you need a really clear vision, and you also need someone who can articulate that vision a lot, and over and over again, to the right people in the right circumstances. You need an external marketer. All of us in engineering at Vanilla [were] all introverts. None of us were going to conferences and giving talks about our vision for community software. It just wasn\u2019t in us to do that. I think we were poorer off in that we had some really good ideas, and could have shifted the conversation a bit, but we didn\u2019t put our energy there because that was a lot of energy.\u201d -Lincoln Russell

Protecting your culture makes you unique from the big social media platforms (33:43):\xa0\u201cI think this idea of being more private and being very selective about what you present to the world, and having an internal culture that is protected from the internet \u2013 not promoted to the internet \u2013 is the future of these independent community spaces because that\u2019s the space those [bigger] platforms cannot touch.\u201d -Lincoln Russell

Community drives great software projects (37:04):\xa0\u201cTo build great software, like the great software projects that are going to outlive me, you need a community of people committed to working on them for long periods of time. [You need] to replace those people when they leave, but you have to have a system to keep that going, not just like, [we] got great five minds in a room and they did a thing, and then they cash out at the end. That\u2019s not sustainable.\u201d -Lincoln Russell

About Lincoln Russell

Lincoln Russell\xa0is the vice president of engineering for\xa0uConnect, which builds virtual career centers for colleges and universities to help students get better jobs. Earlier in his career, he spent 8 and a half years at Vanilla Forums, starting as a senior developer in 2011 and leaving in 2020 as the director of engineering.