That’s a bit of a disingenuous way to put it, it’s reads to me more that they want to reach out/make official what some people were already doing.
Yeah, allowing enthusiasts to represent the community and get perks isn’t crazy.
Yeah, allowing enthusiasts to represent the community and get perks isn’t crazy.
It’s not a community (like Debian), it’s a for-profit company.
It the community of their customers. That’s who these people are representing, to the company. If this was a paid position, they would no longer represent the community.
It’s the same premise as interacting with a subreddit (before Reddit went insane) and recognizing the mods there rather than trying to force the community to one controlled by employees.
it’s reads to me more that they want to reach out/make official what some people were already doing.
So pay them?
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if paying them meaningfully lowered their pool of applicants. I would be very surprised if it didn’t lower the quality of the feedback.
Being an “employee”, regardless of amount paid or frequency of interaction, is something that would cause issues with some people’s real jobs, especially in tech fields, and especially if they’re people who want to encourage their employers to buy Framework in the future.
It also changes the nature of the relationship with Framework, how they interact with the community, and the feedback they’re willing to pass on.
Being an “employee”, regardless of amount paid or frequency of interaction, is something that would cause issues with some people’s real jobs
So does going on business trips for other companies, paid or unpaid.
Exactly. If I really liked Framework laptops and Framework was forced to pay me, I’d refuse and probably stop posting about them. Getting paid for something makes it a job, and a job has expectations. I do hobbies because there’s no expectations, so I can be as consistent or as inconsistent as I want.
For example, I absolutely love Pine64 products, but I would hate Lukasz Erecinski’s job (their official “community manager”) because it takes the fun thing and makes it work, complete with expectations and whatnot. I think someone should get paid for that job, but it shouldn’t be an expectation for prominent members of the community to transition to paid positions.
That said, I wouldn’t say no to some merch as a “thank you,” but I’m not interested in merch as an expectation of future work. Maybe give me new products early to test, but not with the expectation that I’ll post a review or something (I probably will, but again, I don’t want it to be a job).
I feel like they should at least provide them with a laptop If they’re going to do unpaid promotion.
Could at least give them a framework laptop.
Our volunteer ambassadors will attend local Linux and open-source events, meet with other Framework laptop users and potential community members, answer questions, gather feedback, and showcase Framework laptops and parts to those interested. Ambassadors will be in close touch to Framework employees and they will represent the Linux community, feedback and requests directly to our engineers and to our internal Linux team.
That sounds way too close to unpaid labour. I’m all for recognizing community members with perks, merch, and other freebies; but this looks more like soliciting volunteers for unpaid PR.
I’m a big fan of what they are achieving, but if they want free labour they can just eat shit
