There are customers, of course, and stockholders. There are also government regulators, the press, employees and the general public.
You treat each public differently. Many journalists think public relations means buying them drinks. But PR is far more complex than that, which is why I've never felt capable of doing it.
My question for this weekend is, what publics must open source management serve, and in what order?
After talking with several open source company managers in the last few weeks, I have distilled a few Clues to that.
I think it takes a different mindset, and different training, to be a successful open source manager than to be a successful business manager. Based on what I've seen in this area so far, there is far more balancing, and far more hands-on psychology, involved in the open source world than in any commercial space.
What this means to me is that most of what management schools are teaching their students today is wrong. The conclusion surprises me as much as it does you. But management has always been more of an art than a science, and success in open source, from what I've seen, requires far more of the artist than most businesses.