So today, some news broke about a big disconnect between the organizers of the Palm PreDevCamp and Palm.
I have no idea what really happened and I don’t want to speculate. I’m more interested in what can be learned here.
As someone who spends her time working with passionate user communities, I’ve been wondering tonight, what would we have done? If it had been our team, would we have made the same mistakes, different ones, or would we have gotten it right?
You like to think that when push comes to shove you’ll do the right thing. Still, anything involving humans and communication has a chance of going off the rails. Even with the best people and the best intentions you can still end up with a bad outcome.
There’s no way to know until you get there. The best you can do is prepare as much as possible and hope that when it’s your turn under the spotlight, you’ll rise to meet the challenge.
UPDATE 5/23: Looks like Palm is responding well. Kudos all around.