I just posted to our blog about our Second Quarter Community Roadmap for 2020.
Please see the post for details on the projects that our Community team will be delivering this quarter.
We are interested in your thoughts and questions regarding our upcoming projects and priorities on the roadmap.
First, I'm very happy to see two things:
This discussion, linked from the blog post. These have been done before of course, but they've been few and far between; seeing two in two weeks is a sign of trust and willingness to interact with the folks who build these sites on the part of your organization.
The delays and additional feedback rounds for the revised moderator agreement. The original schedule for this was... Optimistic at best; it is, after all, a legal agreement between your organization and a much larger group of volunteers who have little to gain and much to lose by accepting it: if their concerns are being heard, then that again signals a renewed level of trust and good-faith effort on your part.
Second, I'm cautiously optimistic to see this:
We will plan to update the Moderator Reinstatement policy in May to include the Moderator Council’s proposed involvement in the process.
JNat did the best that anyone could have with that policy, but... Ultimately, it was based on a set of hurried notes that I jotted down on a Monday after having worked for 14 days straight and slept very little - that's never going to be a good foundation on which to build. It needs a thorough reworking from the ground up in order to adequately serve its intended purpose. If it helps, I did finally get some sleep and wrote up some notes on how to approach such tasks.
In closing, I want to offer some general encouragement. These are tough times; many of our friends and family members are out of work, sick, even dying. We are collectively more stressed and more isolated than ever before. And so now, more than ever, we need to pull together, to reinforce the supportive bonds of community and to care for each other in moments of weakness. For this reason, even though the tasks on your roadmap may seem to pale in comparison to the grim challenges that we all face, they are nevertheless important to us all. You have a tough road ahead... Godspeed!
In June, we are planning a Community@athon event within our company to encourage employees to interact with our network and communities more. Our goal is to ensure that we have balanced, consistent feedback from across the different segments of our community and that we continue to improve community interactions and understanding throughout the company.
I've said it in other, private spaces, but I want to publicly call out your "understand the community" point as hitting what I think is the most important improvement that can be made at SE right now: use* your own product.
There's a lot your employees are going to learn if they honestly and earnestly engage with any site in the Network. In no particular order:
I don't care what comes out of your Q2 debrief, you have to stick with this. And if you need better support for it than my say-so, maybe a ten year-old blog post can help: https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/06/eating-our-own-careers-dogfood/
* - "use", just to be overly clear, of course includes not only posting questions and answers, but editing, voting, tagging, reviewing, chatting, wandering over to metas....
[trigger warning: self-harm]
Sometimes our moderators will come across content by a user where something is shared that indicates that the user may be considering taking their own life. As you can imagine, these are some of the hardest moments for anyone to encounter. Our moderator team desires to show compassion and care, and this quarter, we’re going to set aside some time to work with organizations that specialize in these interactions. Our goal is to provide a mix of tools, support, and education to ensure that the moderators have the proper guidance and options to hand these situations off to lessen the burden on their shoulders.
You are absolutely right, that these are the hardest moments in moderation. I'm glad to see that you're going to incorporate some external expertise, and I also want to stress that, in my experience, having staff generally-available in the TL should be a top priority when thinking about how to support moderators in these times.
When I've encountered these situations--and I want to make clear to non-mod readers that this is not a frequent thing!--I've been blindsided by them. I've found myself with shaky hands and short of breath, my thoughts have been dashing in a hundred directions at once, I've been worried about whether I've taken the right actions and about what actions I can take. I've had a hard time going back to work and have had to go back to work. (Heck, I'm getting 25% of the way wound up just writing this and reflecting back.)
Each time, staff have been there to walk through it alongside me, and it's been invaluable.
I'd strongly suggest a checklist among the mod-pages: we're all here because we like doing things to help our communities and our members, but in these situations it's hard to even imagine what to do. But in the cold light of retrospection it's easy to say that we should (at least)
ping all fellow site-mods to say "I've seen this, I think it needs to be handled as self-harm, I may not be very responsive to the usual daily grind today."
(At either of those first two points ^^ it should be abundantly clear that it's absolutely fine for the mod to say "I've seen this, I'm initiating the self-harm protocol, and I can't/won't handle it myself." It just needs to be okay--and said so, many times--for someone to throw up the flag and walk away for whatever their reasons are.)
select the "self-harm" template to mod-message the user (to be build by you-all). This contains whatever canned advice and links to help you and your experts think is appropriate.
I'd also strongly recommend that you ask your current moderators who are willing to comb back through mod-messages and mod-room transcripts to look back and write up examples of how these have been handled in the past, what seems to have worked well, what feels in retrospect like it's been dropped. I'm sure those ideas up there are not the best ones you'll find.
And please remember that, since we don't handle many of these, a large fraction of moderators' self-harm alerts are going to be their first ones. We're always going to need staff (or maybe it's mod-council?) with both experience and the ability to look over our shoulder to be there with us. To make sure we're doing helpful things, to check on how we're doing, and to remind us to step away when that's best.
I chime in into the "thank you" sentiment. These are somehow dark times, even for those who are lucky enough to not face existential threats personally. Thus, such positive events are really helpful!
By now, I am really (positively) waiting for the "Loop" results, and the idea of having a Community@athon is just great.
Not being a moderator, it still appears as if the company (finally, again) starts to treat the moderators with the earnesty they deserve for their volunteer efforts. Sure, whether that is enough to convince the majority of "you shouldn't have sacked Monica" users has to be seen. I am still undecided on that aspect, and I hope that simply the company talking and working with larger numbers of moderators more frequently will improve the overall situation "enough".
In June, we plan to begin work on a series of backend and UX updates to review queues to improve the user experience for our curators in addition to backend improvements that will help us make updates more easily in the future
Hear, hear. The queues. Finally.
Even that outlook of "stuff we are used to is going to change" can create some anxiety. It is extremely helpful to have such transparency about future events. Because that helps us to be ready for change. This means that a lot of users can now look at how the situation is right now, in 2020. To assess what we consider problematic, and what we think should be changed, or should be left as is.
Finally, less important:
Should your employees want a recommendation during the Community@thon for a community which is almost certainly relevant (and non-technical): https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/questions
Everybody has a family history, and we're very gentle with newcomers.
For the email drip campaign I'd love to see educational emails, especially on how to design for nondesigners or how to create a website for noncoders.
