Looks like Mambo’s getting into the community PR business with their newly minted Mambo Love site:
This is the official community-driven site for Mambo marketing, PR and advocacy. We hope that through this site we will be able to gather extensive global community support and awareness for Mambo and it will provide resources for members of the community to spread the word and keep the project growing.
While it’s great to see more community-centricspreading projects crop up, it does seem like the flavor of these efforts don’t always capture the genuine ethos of open source. Consider this snippet pertaining to staging Mambo Days (emphasis mine):
Every proposal submission will be taken into consideration, if your proposal has been accepted, we will provide you with the information you need to start your own Mambo event, put you in touch with the people who will be able to help you plan your event and in some cases Mambo communities will offer financial subsidaries* as well.
While this in some ways is similar to how patches are accepted in open source projects, staging your own Mambo meetup is not something that should require a blessing from Mambo, even if they can offer help. Consider what a bunch of us kids did with Bar Camp. Consider what the Spread Firefox community accomplished with the Firefox 1.0 launch parties.
It’s time that these folks wanting to get into community marketing start truly embracing their communities by realizing that their users as a whole are a bunch smarter and more capable than they presently seem to be willing accept. Armed with the right tools, self-organizing advocacy communities can be far more effective than cheesy billion dollar marketing campaigns. Here’s hoping the Mambo folks, who seem a little confused lately, return to the original spirit of open source in their nascent community marketing efforts and empower the passionate grassroots advocates within their community.
Technorati Tags: mambo, spreadspread, opensource
Factory Joe 