Introducing Leslie Doherty, Community Architect
I’m very happy to introduce the EllisLab Community to Leslie Doherty, our newly minted Community Architect. I had the pleasure of introducing her during the EECI2010 keynote and wanted to expand on that brief announcement here, as it was up-staged by a certain forthcoming micro-cms from EllisLab.
Leslie’s role is to make sure the Community (and here I mean all EllisLab communities… CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and MojoMotor) have a direct line to the EllisLab executive and development teams. The Community Architect is also responsible for making sure EllisLab is actively participating in those communities, not just listening and getting feedback.
Back in the day, it was very easy for all of us at EllisLab to remain on the “front lines” and participate in just about every meaningful conversation on our various forums.
Two things have happened that have made that increasingly difficult. First, the combined EllisLab communities have 131,000+ registered members and continue to grow every day.
Second, with the advent of Twitter, a lot of the conversations have moved away from our forums and onto Twitter. This has been a blessing and a frustration. We love Twitter but it is difficult to respond thoroughly in 140 characters. Then there is Facebook, Virb, and Google Buzz, etc…..
Due to the overwhelmingly successful launch of ExpressionEngine 2, we’re very happy that we can return the favor by investing directly into the Community with this new full-time position. We want to honor you, your contributions, and your efforts to make this Community one of the absolute best on the internet.
Leslie starts with a mandate to make this very blog more meaningful to the Community and to start working on making the @ellislab more than just tweeting blog entries and the sporadic occasional responses.
She’ll be working with Jamie (our CodeIgniter Chieftain) and our newly announced Community Partners (EE Insider, Devot-ee, Show-ee) to make sure we’re working in concert and not competing with or rehashing the content you find elsewhere.
We’re taking the long view of this community-building and don’t expect dramatic changes overnight. We’ve given Leslie the authority and time to build sustainable solutions. However, given Leslie’s passion, energy, and excitement for life, I’m sure you’ll see improvements quickly.
We’d love to hear your suggestions for what you’d like to see on this blog, Twitter, and the like. Please leave a post in the Discussion thread for this post or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) directly.
Welcome aboard Leslie!
