Greetings! As most of you should have seen by now, there's a new role – my role – on the forums: PR Communications Officer. In this (belated, thanks to exams) post I want to clarify what that means, where my responsibilities and jobs are, but also want to ask you guys how you think this job within the community can be put to better use. Ready? Let's start!

First of all: Why me? I never made a big secret about the fact that I have been working in the gaming industry for the last 3, 3 ½ years (for the germans: playnation.de ). Mostly as an editor, but since the company I wrote for had a very large outreach, with time I learned not only to write SEO news and articles, video-concepts, interviews and press releases but also how to communicate with Game Developers, Publishers and how to relay important information to the public, organize meetings, all of that stuff. I know a fair bit about how Publishers work and think, what they want out of their clients and therefore became quite good at selling ideas and concepts to them.

About 3 weeks after I joined this community I asked the CMs if they ever thought about contacting Bohemia in an official manner. This plan is still on the way, stuff like the Repo-Update, the general workload that came with 64bit and other things relayed that plan a bit, also formulating what exactly we can realistically ask from and offer to them has to be carefully established. So much for the official PR-part.

But that's not all. After all, the role says “PR and Communications”, not only “PR”. Communication in a community of this size is fundamental, the issues we have with this should be well known by now. So I won't only be responsible for the official contact but also will be making sure that the information given from the CMs to all of you guys has a clear line, structure and especially completeness. Furthermore I am more than happy to act as a mediator between all of you. Over the years in the media industry I learned to take every possible view into consideration, test systems and ideas for flaws – but also to not feel personally attacked when people criticize my professional work or projects I was part of (seriously, if you ever want to take on a job in the media, learn to not give a shit or it'll break you!). There's always room for improvement, people who have a different view on things or ideas of how things should be run. Sorting out, through open and biased-free communication, what's seen as a problem and how people see room for improvements is vital for a healthy PR – so that's what I'm here for.

So – that's basically what I'll do here. Talk. About the important, very official stuff as well as the feedback and ideas that all of you bring to this community. Take a bit of load off the CMs while making sure that certain things within my power get handled more satisfactory for everybody involved.