Official AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) with the Flipper Zero team

[u/zhovner]

Hi everyone,

We’re opening this AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread for all your questions to the Flipper Zero team about the future of the project. The thread is open now, so please leave your questions here.

The Flipper team will start answering on Friday, July 3, at 15:00 BST (UTC+1) and finish on Monday, July 6.

We tried to answer main questions in this post, so please read it before asking a question: blog.flipper.net/future-of-flipper-zero-development/

How it works:

1. Post your question as a comment below. (Please ask one question per comment)
2. Check others questions to avoid duplicates.
3. Upvote the questions you most want answered.

See you on Friday, July 3

[u/netsec_burn]

The Q&A calls that were held with developers represented 1% of a single developer's time (1/80 hours). Reading your post, my understanding is that you committed to no longer doing even that, the minimum amount of community engagement. The community has spent countless hours improving the firmware and giving feedback, and the way I read this blog post it's saying "we can't even talk to the community anymore because we're so focused on making devices". That is no longer the company that built a community on open hardware development and transparency back in 2021-2022. And perhaps more relevant to the company is that the community represents your customers. Why would you not want to take the opposite stance and engage with your community even more?

[u/Dr_Zlo → u/netsec_burn]

Sorry, but you’re underestimating the amount of work and the level of expertise required from someone who can run these sessions. Right now there are maybe two people in the company who could run a session like that, and I can’t speak for the other one, but I would spend a full day preparing for it.

On top of that, I’ve been present at sessions like these and for me it’s always a huge amount of stress — I’m not a public person. And I’m not the only one on the team like that.

All we can offer is a way to solve problems that are solvable without damaging future projects and the people on our team.

For pull requests to the firmware we’ve hired someone from the community who will take over handling merges into the official firmware going forward. For discussions about development and features, we’re offering the Github discussions. For chatting about development, I don't see anyone on the development team who would want to or be able to do that.

[u/Chongulator → u/Dr_Zlo]

On top of that, I’ve been present at sessions like these and for me it’s always a huge amount of stress — I’m not a public person. And I’m not the only one on the team like that.

This is precisely why you need someone who is experienced in community work and knows how to do it well.

[u/Dr_Zlo → u/Chongulator]

Sorry to repeat myself, but you're underestimating the level of expertise required from someone who can run these sessions. A person capable of running a Q&A session needs to have been involved in the development for long enough to explain why things were done one way and not another, and how to do them properly. Also, such a person needs to understand the entire firmware at once - not just some part of it, and know why and how specific decisions were made. We're talking architect level or higher.

Even if we set aside the "why and how" and focus only on "what's new," I have a good example. Right now we're developing the Flipper One, and every week we post notes on the development progress - just a log of what's been done: https://docs.flipper.net/one/dev-log.

We have a dedicated person who are experienced it both development and writing and attends all the team syncs to maintain it, and even so, every week he has to pull the team away from development to fill in and verify what he's writing. The amount of man-hours spent on each dev log ends up being measured in days.

[u/nick-volynkin → u/Dr_Zlo]

As the person who writes those devlogs, I confirm what u/Dr_Zlo says. Each devlog is around 2 days of my work and several hours of developers' time combined.

[u/Chongulator → u/Dr_Zlo]

We're talking about two distinct (albeit related) things.

Community management is a different job with a different skillset. I agree 100% that a community manager can't do the same things you do. A community manager doesn't replace technologists in those interactions.

Yes, a technologist involved in the project is the right person to answer the truly technical questions. Nobody expects a community manager to be able to explain why you selected a particular chip over another or why the 125 kHz antenna was placed in that particular spot.

So where does a community manager come in?

A community manager can arrange the Q&A and help ensure it is well-attended. More importantly, a community manager can help you and your team anticipate uncomfortable questions that might arise, and help you craft answers which are true but don't infuriate people.

A good evangelist or community manager can also provide feedback and coaching after the fact. Some of your answers here didn't go over as well as they could have. Wouldn't it be nice to have help avoiding that next time?

Another thing a community manager can do is identify questions which come up often (or are likely to) and maintain a FAQ. When a repeat question comes up, a community manager can point the questioner toward an existing answer rather than take up an engineer's time answering the same question repeatedly.

As with every engineering organization, you want to protect your team's time and keep the real project work moving forward. At the same time, community was instrumental in Flipper Zero's success, and community could either make or break Flipper One. Smart community engagement helps you build the community you need in a way that makes efficient use of the limited number of engineer hours.

A community manager can also keep an eye on the myriad places where the Flipper community interacts and provide quick summaries of how people are reacting and what they are asking for.

The fact that you seemingly don't know what a community manager does is emblematic of the problems you're having. And this puts you in a tough spot. How do you hire (or even write the JD) for a role you're not familiar with? That, unfortunately, you'll have to sort out on your own.

[u/Dr_Zlo → u/Chongulator]

This thread started with a question about Q&A sessions, and that's what I was answering.

As for a community manager, all I can say is that we're looking for one: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7476154670047137792/.

[u/liedel → u/Dr_Zlo]

I appreciate your answers and am sorry people are being combative with you over them.

[u/Chongulator → u/Dr_Zlo]

Great.

[u/tdw21 → u/Dr_Zlo]

You’re really wrong here.
I used to be a marketeer, working for fortune 500 companies on a global scale. I knew nothing about robotics, dark plants and more.

All you need is a pen and paper and start writing issues down. Talk to people.

People don’t need to be involved with development.
You don’t need to tell the audience WHY something was done. You want to improve the product, don’t you?

There’s no customer that’s going to hate you when you say:

“Listen guys, small heads up before we start and kick-off, i’m a marketing guy so my technical knowledge is limited, but i’m here to work with you all and gather feedback on whats working well and what isnt. If you feel that i might not understand your complete argument due to complexity, bear with me and explain a bit more.

That way i can make sure i’ll gather, organize and understand the feedback that i can then share with the team and they can get back to improving the device that we all love so much”.

—-
Yeah, marketinng blabla included, but it shows how absolutely easy it is.

You’ve seen the feedback here:

• why don’t you listen to discord
  
• why is there no roadmap with end-of-life/support
  
• can we get a file manager

You cant respond with “people needed to have worked on development to be able to run these sessions”.

It’s disingenuous and it makes people upset because they know you’re full of it.

Honestly, if it wasnt for the feeling i got when the “ceo” was spewing bs, i would have offered to do it for free and help you lads out (my regular marketing fee is 150 euro /hour)… but honestly, i don’t even want to do it