1. 90% of all community feedback is crap.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately. Sturgeon’s Law can’t be denied by any man, woman, child … or community, for that matter. Meta community, I love you to death, so let’s be honest with each other: most of the feedback and feature requests you give us are just not, uh, er … actionable, for a zillion different reasons.

But take heart: this means 10% of the community feedback you’ll get is awesome! I guarantee you’ll find ten posts that are pure gold, that have the potential to make the site clearly better for everyone … provided you have the intestinal fortitude to look at a hundred posts to get there. Be prepared to spend a lot of time, and I mean a whole freaking lot of time, mining through community feedback to extract those rare gems. I believe every community has users savvy enough to produce them in some quantity, and they’re often startlingly wonderful.

2. Don’t get sweet talked into building a truck.

You should immediately triage the feedback and feature requests you get into two broad buckets:

We need power windows in this car!

or

We need a truck bed in this car!

The former is, of course, a reasonable thing to request adding to a car, while the latter is a request to change the fundamental nature of the vehicle. The malleable form of software makes it all too tempting to bolt that truck bed on to our car. Why not? Users keep asking for it, and trucks sure are convenient, right?

Don’t fall into this trap. Stay on mission. That car-truck hybrid is awfully tempting to a lot of folks, but then you end up with a Subaru Brat. Unless you really want to build a truck after all, the users asking for truck features need to be gently directed to their nearest truck dealership, because they’re in the wrong place.

3. Be honest about what you won’t do.

It always depressed me to see bug trackers and feedback forums with thousands of items languishing there in no man’s land with no status at all. That’s a sign of a neglected community, and worse, a dishonest relationship with the community. It is sadly all too typical. Don’t do this!

I’m not saying you should tell your community that their feedback sucks, even when it frequently does. That’d be mean. But don’t be shy about politely declining requests when you feel they don’t make sense, or if you can’t see any way they could be reasonably implemented. (You should always reserve the right to change your mind in the future, of course.) Sure, it hurts to be rejected – but it hurts far more to be ignored. I believe very, very strongly that if you’re honest with your community, they will ultimately respect you more for that.

All relationships are predicated on honesty. If you’re not willing to be honest with your community, how can you possibly expect them to respect you … or continue the relationship?

4. Listen to your community, but don’t let them tell you what to do.

It’s tempting to take meta community requests as a wholesale template for development of your software or website. The point of a meta is to listen to your community, and act on that feedback, right? On the contrary, acting too directly on community feedback is incredibly dangerous, and the reason many of these community initiatives fail when taken too literally. I’ll let Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of GitHub, explain:

Consider a feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested, but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets requirements of both functionality and elegance.

Community feedback is great, but it should never be used as a crutch, a substitute for thinking deeply about what you’re building and why. Always try to identify what the underlying needs are, and come up with a sensible roadmap.

5. Be there for your community.

Half of community relationships isn’t doing what the community thinks they want at any given time, but simply being there to listen and respond to the community. When the co-founder of Stack Exchange responds to your meta post – even if it wasn’t exactly what you may have wanted to hear – I hope it speaks volumes about how committed we are to really, truly building this thing alongside our community.

Regardless of whether money is changing hands or not, you should love discovering some small gem of a community request or bugfix on meta that makes your site or product better, and swooping in to make it so. That’s a virtuous public feedback loop: it says you matter and we care and everything just keeps on getting better all in one delightful gesture.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?

bobulate: Seth Godin on the hill approach to career development:

Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.

The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career.

Career wisdom in hill format.

See also: the brick approach.

And how do you make a call in the field? Well, the more mature you become, the more seasoned you become, the smarter you become, the wiser. That’s probably a better way of putting it. When your working on the Outer banks David, or your working on Rio, or your doing one of your own projects in Rio, the day’s that you really feel the rush are the days when you feel like things are coming at you so fast, things are happening, and everything that you have ever experienced in your life, is coming to bear that day. You’re in the zone as athletes say. And when you’re in the zone, you’re drawing on all this life experience and what you’re doing, too, is basically following your gut. You’re thinking, sure, but you’re not over thinking. There’s a visceral, gut way of working. And what I’ve learned here is that as you become more confident, as you make mistakes because if your not making mistakes, man your not pushing yourself hard enough.

If you get afraid of making mistakes, you are toast. You’re done. You’ve got to have courage. You’ve got to believe in yourself and the people who you surround yourself with, that you can go ahead, and your going to weigh the options, your going to be decisive, but a lot of its going to be visceral. This is really important because when it comes too intellectual, it becomes too cool. But when it becomes more visceral, and I’m not talking about flying off the handle, but there’s a gut thing.

And you could be looking at a cover, and your going, you know, man that cover, we’ve worked and worked and worked on it, but it’s not right. It’s not there. And I can’t really quite tell you why. Then over time you can probably figure out why, but it goes for a layout, it goes for a lead picture, you know, how we open the ipad, what kind of video we use, and basically what I’m talking about is a refined throughout your life to grieve taste. A lot of what you do at National Geographic is you’re an arbiter or taste. And of course what we want to do, I don’t want to be elitist, unapproachable, inaccessible, but I want this to be an experience of high taste. That you cant get any place else, and of course when you tap into that gut reaction knowing that there are times you’re going to be wrong, admit your wrong, move on, learn. It’s very analogous to being a photographer in a field, and everyday making decisions.

1. When asked if serious illness had changed his view of the afterlife, Hitchens replied: “I would say it fractionally increases my contempt for the false consolation element of religion and my dislike for the dictatorial and totalitarian part of it.

“It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.”

2. Hitchens once branded Mother Teresa “a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf” and said: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.

“She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”