The SO blog page Introducing “The Loop”: A Foundation in Listening states:
A month ago we formed cross-functional teams of Stackers (employees of Stack Overflow) to create strategies to start addressing some of these concerns. It’s been inspiring to see people from our Community Management team work hand in hand with folks from Engineering, Sales, and Marketing to come up with solutions for our community’s most pressing concerns. We’ve worked together to build new communication frameworks that take into account how we’ve scaled and to replace old frameworks that don’t work now that we’re larger.
The themes these groups took on are:
- Better mechanisms for community feedback
- Building a moderator advisory group
- How we communicate and interact with Meta sites moving forward
I find it troubling that the company seems to be taking only a top-down approach to "come up with solutions for our community's most pressing concerns". The blog page says they've worked with different groups within the company, but it doesn't give any indication (and I've not seen any particular evidence either) that they've even asked, much less tried to work with, members of the "community", e.g., most of the people reading this or other more particularly involved members, about what "we" consider to be our biggest problems, as well as how any of their (or, especially, any of our) suggestions about how the company can best solve "our" problems will address these issues.
Another example of their top-down approach is regarding their proposed feedback mechanisms, where the blog page states:
That’s why we’re creating a working group of users made up of people from all corners of the developer community — from folks new to programming, those who don’t participate in Stack Overflow but are passionate about programming, experienced Stack Overflow users, frequent contributors, and more. We’ll hand-select folks of diverse backgrounds who are excited to chat with us regularly about everything from new ideas to features, to how we communicate with the broader Stack Overflow community.
I added the emphasis on "hand-select". Instead of perhaps having an election or some other community-based selection method for determining who "we" believe can best represent & communicate our needs to the company, they will instead choose whoever they want to. No indication is given of what criteria they will use to decide this. Although they may often make good choices, I believe they will likely not choose anybody who decides to question what they're doing too much. An excellent recent example is a certain former moderator who, based on the best information I was able to find, was "fired" just a few months ago for doing this.
Nonetheless, being an optimist, I hope that what they implement will help improve the situation for us, or at least not make things too much worse. Also, where any particular changes are generally detrimental, I hope they will realize this quickly (e.g., through their various surveys or feedback from their "hand-selected" group) and then try to improve the situation. Although what the company wants compared to the diverse (including even sometimes rather contradictory) needs & goals of the "community", especially the generally most active members such as those on this meta site, don't always coincide, I like to believe the company will at least give reasonable consideration to what we're asking to be done, or not be done, before they make their decisions, and then change them afterwards if need be.
