Perhaps the issue for me is that I can see why it’s different, and am confused that the “WHAT” is only weakly materializing. This thread has been re-shaping my understanding of the GTG’s aims, filling in blanks that were never really explained before. Hence I’m understanding more why you don’t do the things I expected.
I agree it bears repeating. In fact I’d say it should go on the front page, just to make sure people realise your position (even if they don’t necessarily understand it).
A lot of confusion could have been avoided if not only the GTG’s aims but also it’s strategy had been on the JGO front page. For strategy I mean e.g. perhaps (just making this up as an example) : “mainly by convincing big names to use the java platform at all, rather than helping small companies who’ve already adopted it to make the most of the platform”)
That sums up the idea quite well. I agree it’s not particularly relevant on a “random individual person” level, but AFAIAA the majority of community management people accept that this philosophy is almost entirely true for whoever has created or is running - or is the main influence within - the community. It’s one of those things that makes starting, supporting, or existing as a major player within a community a time-consuming task - you need to keep your image in line with your reality.
Evidence from private correspondence suggests I am less of a minority than I’ve been accused of being by the GTG and SK. It would be helpful for things like this if every reader said everything about themselves so you’d know. But they of course don’t, and this is another reason community mgmt is time consuming - only a minority are vocal about things. Getting opinions from all is a huge hassle, so instead many community managers use a rule of thumb e.g. for every one person with a complaint there are usually another 100 people who feel the same way but won’t bother saying so - especially once they see someone else voicing the problem (“it’s OK, someone else is dealing with it. I don’t need to bother”).
All a comm mgr has to do then is check each complaint and make a decision where it’s a one-person only issue, or it’s a one-person-standing-for-100-people issue. The base assumption is always the latter - the former happens only rarely.
I’m not saying “that’s what you should do”, just outlining a technique that I know works for quite a lot of people. Certainly, the fact that only one person has an opinion, a misunderstanding, or a complaint is NEVER a reason in and of itself to ignore them. And it should never even be mentioned (note: I’ve often made it clear that I’m not claiming that I’m speaking for other people).
An excellent point. Now you need to also “realize that people make business plans on what [you] DON’T say” (and I wish I’d thought of that way of phrasing things earlier :)). People will make their business plans either way, and saying nothing when you’re farily sure something is happening is no better than saying too much when you really can’t be sure anything will happen.
In other industries where I’ve worked, the open attitude of the engineers gets them fired if they do stuff like they do in this industry. Doesn’t seem to happen here.
However, I doubt either of us will convince the other otherwise, and it’s likely to sink into personal attacks, so I’ll just accept your statement as true from here on.
To put it back in context, my response was right next to your statement that “individuals are not the issue”. It would help if YaBB preserved nested quotes (the fact that it doesn’t means people get misquoted because of lost context 
).
Let’s look at it in theory. Say you have a professional java games developer (an employee of a java games studio, for instance - I know several that exist, and from what I’ve seen there are many many more) who wants info on java tailored to his needs. How long does it take him to find JGO, and how many other sites does he find that seem to answer his needs? (Statements from Chris suggest the first answer is “very little time at all”, and AFAIAA the answer to the second is “none”).
Here is a site run by Sun, owned by Sun, and dedicated to java games development. It doesn’t force open-source, and it doesn’t force paid membership. It encourages and makes use of everything available - open-source for some projects, promotion of commercial projects, etc.
So, do you think it’s credible that in the several years that JGO has been attracting millions of hits that it hasn’t managed to accrue a significant number of pro java games developers?
The fact is I happen to know quite a few who are registered here, but I respect the fact that they’ve remained silent and so I’m not about to start naming them (I don’t know why they don’t declare themselves…and initiatives like this poll might get them to give us some idea!)
I’m getting confused - both you and Chris re-iterate this to me frequently, yet it’s something I never expected and never asked for. I thought I’d even clearly stated this, in fact it sounds incredibly stupid to me unless you were given an extra couple of hundred staff. Do you think that I want or expect it?
