I was reading your long email, and this has been on my mind for a long
time, but in order to get the freedom respecting software technology
into the hands of everyone for everything instead of proprietary
software, what you have to solve is not a technology problem, but a
marketing problem.
If you think about how we got to the state we are in today, with
proprietary software dominating in certain areas of computing, you have
to remember that the reason for that is because of marketing, not
because the products are better, but because of how people know about
it, and the social relationships between people. Just because software
has always been promoted a certain way, or that even it is promoted in
a different way does not mean we have to keep doing it that way.
I keep thinking about what you said, how asking questions is a skill
that is honed with practice, and not everyone has mastered it, and how
it goes over differently with different audiences. Then you talk about
all those newbie questions and how people just want their stuff to
work.
Why should people have to answer endless newbie questions for free all
the time, why can’t that be a paid job? Why wouldn’t people pay someone
to hold their hand and basically help them through everything?
A lot of the thinking about this kind of thing comes from people in the
technology space, people who like to fool around for hours on end to
get things to work, rather than just ask someone and have it done in
five seconds. We have this fascination with technology and are happy
to, for hours on end, get the search engines to hopefully bring in
relevant results and then tweak them until it works.
Yet, once you are in the mindset of a tech person, how can you get into
the mindset of your opposite, the marketing person selling memberships,
the multi-level network marketer, a person whose focus is on people,
marketing and selling, not technology?
The thing with marketing, is it is just as innovative as technology,
and techniques that worked to get peoples attention and get them to buy
are always changing, and yet the principles are timeless. You have to
get the product in front of an audience and convince people that it is
the product for them, or that it is the service for them.
So, with that I have some questions. What if we improved tech support
by bringing people in who speak the customers own language in terms
they can understand? What if we brought people in whose strengths were
not so focused on the technology piece, but on the human piece, and
focused on the way people use technology rather than trying to turn
everyone into a tech guru?
I’ve often wondered if certain strategies used in marketing focused
businesses could be used for tech support. What if the person selling
the support could be responsible for the people they bring in, for
getting them the help that they want with freedom respecting software?
What if it was not about trying to save money, but people buying a
membership in a community where they feel welcome and understood?
I’m only one person, and I certainly don’t have all the answers, and I
don’t expect technology focused people to necessarily wrap their heads
around the idea that people are literally buying into this idea of a
community and not a product or service. But, yet this is essentially
what the free software foundation is, and we need to take this concept
and expand it. We need to reach new markets through people whose
primary interest is in marketing and relationships.
I really think this needs to be discussed further. I do not think the
issues are unsolvable, but that they will require always going outside
of our communities, but also going outside our own modes of thought and
becoming our opposites.
On Sunday, May 22, 2022, 08:56:00 PM EDT, Yasuaki Kudo
wrote:
With partners, I am currently trying to start a "digital commons
movement", if you will, a community where people learn together and
rebuild a new collaborative society based on partnership of the equals,
and I stress this term equal partnership - zero hierarchy, zero "come
back later when you know know how to ask better questions", zero
knowledge worshipping, zero founder, zero leadership - initially
focused on the digital domain to bootstrap the movement.
In such a community, yes, any question, suggestion or statement will be
welcome! They are not only welcome but will probably form the backbone
of the society.
Erica's really good points and many others we discussed here such as
the twitter replacement, make me think that time is ripe for this.
In the community I am thinking of, Free Software will be an important
part but it will not be the end goal or the most dominant focus.
Rather, Free Software will be a natural choice, because the
