It’s been a while since the last in the community management series. In this latest post Lorna Mitchell gives her 3 tips. Lorna is co-project lead for http://joind.in – an open source development project for gathering event feedback. She says “The other project lead is Chris Cornutt, a guy I’ve met three times over three years, who lives in a timezone 6 hours out from mine.”

Lorna worked as a telecommuter for a number of years and did community relations in that role, and was involved in running PHPWomen, a global user group bringing together women programming PHP, “with all the cultural and linguistic variations that brings.”

Lorna’s tips are:

Keep communicating

A running commentary of what you are doing and thinking is essential when you are working with people who can’t see you and may not have met you.

Communicate appropriately

Don’t hold a discussion over Twitter that would be better in long hand over email. Make a phone call rather than having days of comment and response on a bug tracker.

Be inclusive

Nothing turns newcomers off faster than lots of in-jokes or references to people they don’t know or places they didn’t go.