Feedback on the Trees for Bugs Initiative

While the information on how the Trees for Bugs initiative was excecuted is summarized here, this blog post will take a look at the feedback we received. 

We counted more than 30 on-line articles published about the initiative, some of them from media in our industry. One of them at CMSWIRE; their editors always take the time to get to know all details and then write an article in a brief but concise way and, moreover, in a very short time. Just as Barb Mosher has done here.

Is IT a Green Industry? This question is answered by a great article “Green supporting Green” written by Bob Larrivee.

Kentico Developers Magazine dedicated an article to the initiative in the October issue and it will cover the topic more deeply in some of its upcoming issues.

Blogosphere was hit with our message too. Don’t know the real reason for it, but many of the blogs were in Spanish (from Spain, Argentina etc.). Check out the translation of the comments under one of them. Today, we are able to say that the initial thoughts of the author of the blog post were false since only 60 bugs were found!

The initiative also infiltrated the tickets we were getting from our clients:

• Great! Please make sure it is a plum tree. I am gonna be coming to pick all plums up every season! And also thanks for doing it for me. Now I only need to build a house and have a son myself!
• This is a great idea. You guys made me laugh just when I needed it. I hope the devs don’t have to work too hard planting those trees!

Finally, let me mention some of the feedback we got from the social networking sites (mostly Twitter and Linkedin, fewer from Facebook):

• Bravo Kentico for a masterstroke of feel-good PR. If all vendors do this we can reforest the world.
• Hey Guys, This is an absolutely brilliant idea. Dev team wins, customers win and environment. The dev team might not agree, but this is so much better than bugs for beers. Bloody well done.
• Kentico plants a tree 4 every bug what happens if the other CMS vendors follow. OpenSource? Rainforests rejoice!
• This is such a fantastic idea... almost wish I thought of it...
• What a fantastic idea that is and people say us IT types aren’t Green conscious. My hat goes off to you guys for a truly green idea.

We are happy that the initiative pleased our clients and we were (and we always will!) be able to fix all the reported bugs within 7 working days. Although only a little, we helped nature and enjoyed a great Saturday outdoors.

P.S. As I promised in a comment in my last blog post, I went to check and water the trees three weeks after we planted them – the pictures below were taken on that day.