**Parent Topic**: [[Software/README]] ## Acknowledge First, Explain Later Champ's rule for the community manager: "Typically, I would just tell the community, 'Hey, yes, there's an issue. The engineering team is looking into it. We'll get back to you.'" It is *not* the community manager's job to define what's going wrong — they're usually not technical. The job is to signal that **somebody is paying attention**, then get the technical lowdown from ops when appropriate and share what's shareable. ## Silence Lets It Blow Up "If you don't quickly acknowledge that there's an issue, things can blow out of proportion externally." Fast acknowledgment caps the speculation and the inbound pressure before it snowballs — especially in a large corporation where, once PR gets involved, "everybody wants to know what's going on." ## What the Community Actually Wants Members mostly want to calibrate their own behavior: "Should I go have a cup of coffee, should I go take a walk, or should I come back tomorrow?" A quick acknowledgment answers that even before the diagnosis exists. Enabled by [[Separate Fixing from Communicating]]. --- *Source: [[Web Operations]] (Allspaw & Robbins, O'Reilly 2010) — Ch 8 — Community Management and Web Operations*