Let's use Town Hall chats to bridge the gap between company and community

Question

It seems that Stack Exchange is doing an increasingly poor job of communicating with the community about policy changes, decision-making processes, and problem solving. This has caused or exacerbated a number of recent crises, and is actively contributing to many of us feeling more and more distant from the company. I doubt I'm alone when I say that I feel like I don't really know Stack Exchange, Inc., any more. And if you don't know someone, it's substantially harder to trust them.

One way to build trust, then, is to bring employees and community members closer together, so we can see the humans on the other side of the monitor. I've found that chat is a great way for that to happen. Shog talking about chicken-fried steak in The Tavern, for instance, builds trust on some subconscious level. There's a person behind those words. As a mod, I tend to get more access to CMs through the Teacher' Lounge, and I've found that that access builds trust in those particular individuals, whereas I have less trust in the employees I don't interact with. It's not just correlation at work. It's human nature.

We used to have Town Hall chats on Meta, with the most recent reincarnation happening in 2017 (see an earlier post for details). Those seemed to be reasonably successful; I certainly enjoyed them. I would bet that they helped bridge the company-community gap a little, and I would further bet that more regular chats would do more.

Here's my proposal: We bring these chats back. They could happen maybe . . . once a week? Twice a month? (Timing estimates are not my strong suit.) The exact time could vary to accommodate folks in a variety of timezones. The chats would be ideally focused around a topic proposed in advance by community members and would provide an interactive way to informally discuss concerns, policies, and decisions. They'd provide users with a window into the company, and employees with another window into the userbase. The users feel like they better have the ear of Stack Exchange, Inc. - because they would. I don't have a great idea of the logistic particulars, and would love to hear suggestions for how to make this work.

The current relationship between the company and the community is not sustainable. It's not. Providing a space and a time for communication can be one part of the solution.

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Note: As a clarification, I should add that this is not intended to be a measure to mitigate or solve the problems we're dealing with at present. It is intended as a way to reduce the chance of the company jumping off the same cliff in the future.

Answer 1

The current relationship between the company and the community is not sustainable.

At this point, we've got a much bigger problem.

What was before a simple (not really, though) "community vs company" has now split further. We now - as you might be able to tell from various comments - have further rifts within the "community" itself and honestly, I'm not so sure how we'd even go about fixing that.

These (political, social, religious etc.) differences in the community of course existed between users prior to the CoC debacle but they were never discussed as they've never played a focal point in any of the sites, but now, with the CoC playing a major role in all three of those aspects, it isn't the case anymore.

"community vs company" can be solved by SE (and only SE) through some plain old transparency into the fiascoes that took place over the last month, so many calls for this have been made by various users.

Your idea actually might help, though, on the other hand, it might just escalate the situation much more.

Answer 2

I think that this is a well-intentioned idea, but I don't believe it to be sustainable. Perhaps someone can prove me wrong, but having an effective Town Hall style chat at the scale that Stack Exchange is at today is almost impossible - we are millions of users (I'm sure an SEDE query can identify the number of unique user accounts) across 170+ communities.

Instead of global Town Halls, I think a couple of things are more realistic.

First, moderators need to be the liaisons that they were intended to be. Every Stack Exchange community has a Help Center page that defines the role of the moderators. The very last identified role is that of a liaison between the community and the company. This goes two ways. Moderators need to be vocal (and there are appropriate outlets for it) to the company about issues and concerns. The company also needs to bring information to moderators before going public with it (as we've seen with the drafts of the removal process and the updated CoC pronoun FAQ). Continuing and improving this bidirectional communication is essential.

Second, staff should be interacting more on MetaSE. There are plenty of discussions with no input from staff. Plenty of feature requests that are not closed, but also don't have a status-* tag applied. Plenty of questions that can be given a more authoritative answer from staff rather than just a seasoned community member (even if that "answer" is a comment confirming the correctness of an already given answer). In some cases, it may even be possible to solicit feedback on ideas from the community, but ideally it's gone through moderators first to take care of any likely common concerns.

Third, and this is probably more optional, but seeing staff members asking and answering questions, participating in chats, and just generally using the services provided here would be nice.

I like the intention of the post here. But I do want to ensure that any solution is actually scalable given the current size of the user base, number of unique communities, and size of the SE staff (particularly the CM team).

Answer 3

If we set aside the elephant in the room for a moment, I don't think chat is the best way to speak with the global community due to time zone differences.

Chat moves very fast, and lengthy discussions not separated into threads may be hard to follow for both newbies and experiences chat users. Keeping up with discussions by looking up which messages reply to which is near impossible if they're separated by more than a vertical screen height's distance.

Question and Answer format here on Meta moves at a much more manageable pace, and allows users to take their time to compose messages and comment under specific posts, keeping discussion organized.

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side note: If we had a threaded forum but with compact posts (like multi-level threaded Reddit comment structure, as opposed to single-level "comments under posts" structure on StackExchange Q&A engine), I think that format would be a lot better suited for discussions, allowing for sub-threads under big topics where users can discuss details between each other without interfering with other comments under the same post (thread root).

Answer 4

Too little, too late.

SE, having shot itself in the foot, has decided to go full auto. I remember the postings where they referred to themselves as "benevolent dictators", and then threw Monica to the wolves, and committed what may well be libel in a news story.

SE has lost the trust of the user base, as evidenced by the old FAQ getting hit with a -1930 rating, before getting deleted.

A town hall will not cut it.

At this point, I'm not sure what, if anything will.

They have managed, in the course of a few scant weeks, to destroy the good will that has been built up for years.

They have yet to issue a public apology to Monica They have yet to retract the libel published about Monica They continue to censor and delete en masse, any disagreements or discussions.

Although it would be amusing to witness such a town hall, as many would come with pitchforks and torches, they need to heal the wounds first and foremost before they do anything. At this point, I don't even know if that is possible.