55

I wanted to share with you about who the people that work on our Community are, and how we are organized. For context, I (Teresa Dietrich) am the head of Product, Community, Design and Engineering, a combined Chief Product and Technology Officer. I joined the company in mid January and report directly to Prashanth Chandrasekar, the CEO. Both of the following teams are members of the organization that I lead.

Our Community Team endeavors to ensure the well-being of our sites and that the needs of our users are heard. That means focusing on things like facilitating communication from our users to the company, and making sure our users are well aware of initiatives coming from inside Stack Overflow. We also are responsible for the trust and safety for our users, and supporting our moderators and curators.

The Community Team includes:

The Community Team is divided into four sub-teams: the Community Engagement and Enablement team, the Trust and Safety Team, the Community Strategy team, and the Community Support team.

  • The Community Engagement and Enablement team
    (led by Rosie) is responsible for projects involving tools and requests from the community, such as running elections and handling tickets escalated by moderators.

  • The Trust and Safety team (led by Cesar) is responsible for handling user safety on the platform, including preventing harassment, PII concerns, and other abusive behaviors on the network.

  • The Community Support team (also led by Cesar) is responsible for communication and support for moderators and users, and they staff our community manager escalations emails. This team is who you'll primarily be dealing with when you write us from the /contact pages.

  • The Community Strategy team (led by Philippe) consists of the team leads for each of the teams, as well as Nic, our data analyst, and Berthold, who is the main CM for Collectives on Stack Overflow, and looks after our liaison work with the product team (this is time spent consulting on tooling, new features, etc, and communicating them out to you, as well as collecting and sharing feedback to the product teams).

We have recently renamed the product development team that builds our public Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites to the Public Platform Team. You may see questions and/or answers from members of this team here and across the sites.

Our Public Platform Team includes:

Yaakov Ellis, a developer on the Public Platform Engineering team, has recently taken on an additional role as Community Advocate. He now spends approximately 25% of his time working on community projects including policy and communication. He also leads a group of employees throughout the company that are or have been active members of our community called the Community Members at Large. This team of about 10 are volunteers who care deeply about the community and provide feedback around policy and communications.

I hope this gives you some insights into who we are and how we work together. If you have questions or if there are any clarifications I can make, please put them in an answer and we’ll try to respond as best we can.

Improve this question
10
  • 8
    While there is already a lot of other terms in here that I have zero idea what they mean, I particularly stumbled over the terminology in "...leads a group of employees throughout the company [who] are volunteers..." I assume they are "volunteers" in the sense of volunteering to take up this additional task inside their employer SE. Or is this trying to say something else? Also what does "are or have been active members of our community" mean in that sentence, especially what is "community" there? If it is the employer SE, then how can those members "have been" active if they're employees?
    – Christian Rau
    Jun 11, 2020 at 17:39
  • 12
    @ChristianRau "volunteer" - they want to participate, not something part of their normal job description, "Community" = Stack Exchange network sites. There are a number of employees who have been active on the network for years. Almost everyone on the Community Members at Large has been active for a few years on the network (for most, preceding their employ at Stack), with tens if not hundreds of thousands of cumulative rep.
    – Yaakov Ellis StaffMod
    Jun 11, 2020 at 18:20
  • Seems like I just saw this. What is the "Community Members at Large" group and how were its members chosen? Is there another announcement about that group/process that I have missed? cc @YaakovEllis
    – TylerH
    Jul 1, 2020 at 20:12
  • 1
    The Community Members at Large are comprised of members of the the company who are interested in being more active with promoting positive interactions with the Community, and serving as ambassadors to the rest of the company in trying to achieve and maintain this company value. They are former Moderators, Community Managers or active users with a strong passion for the sites and the community. We ask these voluntary team members to review policy, provide feedback, and most recently, serve as mentors to others in the company on our Community-a-thon.
    – Teresa Dietrich StaffMod
    Jul 9, 2020 at 14:14
  • 3
    Since "Reach and Relevance" demonstrably affects the Public Q&A Site; will those members be listed as well as how they intersect with everyone else?
    – George Stocker
    Jun 25, 2021 at 16:16
  • 2
    Congratulations to all the folks who were promoted.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Oct 15, 2021 at 11:32
  • Emma has a Flair badge (on MSE), but Bella and Salmon had their badge linked to the network profile; leaving them disabled. --- Don't know if that's intentionally spilt that way, or should be fixed with an edit. --- Vanny is the opposite, linked only to MSE, while having enough network flair.
    – Rob
    Nov 16, 2021 at 19:27
  • @Rob without 200 rep on at least one site, there is no network flair, so can only use per-site flair, it is intentional. Once the user get 200 rep somewhere, someone will usually edit to show the network flair.
    – Shadow Wizard Says No More War
    yesterday
  • @Rob well of course, my reply to your comment addressed the situation of the post in the time you commented and explains why some flairs were broken. I know it has been fixed since then.
    – Shadow Wizard Says No More War
    yesterday
  • @Sha, I already knew; having approved some of the edits.
    – Rob
    yesterday

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
39

Is the size and composition of the CM Team planned to stay as it is right now for the near future? A significant number of CMs were fired or resigned, but the workload probably didn't get any smaller. A lot of institutional knowledge about community management and the internals of how many SE systems work behind the scenes were also lost at that time.

From my observations, the CMs also aren't exactly good at stepping back and relaxing, I've seen them plenty of times at the weekend or at various odd hours. There's probably a higher chance of burning out as a community manager as the community can't really scale their demands to the workload.

Most recent initiatives to improve community relations seem like good ideas to me. But a lot of them also create more work for the CMs, but the team only got smaller. There are some good parts here like making Yaakov's role as Community Advocate official, that could help with some of the CM workload. If SE doesn't plan to increase the size of the CM Team again, I hope there's at least real progress in automating some of the routine stuff and improving the tools. As otherwise I can't really see how the workload could stay manageable.

Improve this answer
8
  • 5
    We currently have ongoing discussions about both of these topics. What is the right way to scale and determine the number of CMs that we have based on community data? We are working on this so we can know how many we need and will need in the future. We are also working on identifying actions that can be automated and/or turned into a tool in increase efficiency. First we need to come up with the answers/solution, then we will work out a path to implement them.
    – Teresa Dietrich StaffMod
    Jun 12, 2020 at 15:03
  • 7
    Its felt like after its peak, its generally been a team that's taken a hit every downsize. The promises of further automation and efficiency are nice but we've been hearing them for years as a response to every downsizing or request for additional resources. The recent "realignment" was a kick to the gut too. At some point, its tempting to try to throw more tech at the problem but a large extent of CM work's dealing with people at a human level.We've just heard it often enough that it feels... insufficient and somewhat less meaningful than it needs to be.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Jun 13, 2020 at 5:35
  • 1
    @JourneymanGeek I mostly mentioned that part because I consider it more likely that this can be sold to SE management compared to increasing the headcount of the CM team. But yeah, I wouldn't count on this to happen given how often we've talked about that already.
    – Mad Scientist
    Jun 13, 2020 at 8:20
  • 3
    The big problem with automation isn't that it won't help, @Journeyman - it's that it's expensive. Even more expensive in the short term than hiring more CMs. It is a good long-term investment... But when money is too scarce to hire more staff, it is likely also too scarce to cover enough automation to make up for the lack of staff.
    – Shog9
    Jun 15, 2020 at 22:06
  • Well you have the inside view - but simply even if SE had the money, you just can't automate dealing with people. That and it's been the promised solution for years. At this point I don't see any benefit that couldn't have been realized if it was really a solution
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Jun 15, 2020 at 22:14
  • @JourneymanGeek The automation is for the part that isn't actually about people, so mostly vote fraud and routine support stuff. You can't automate the hard part, but vote fraud, vote invalidation and similar stuff should really be at least partially automated. I've no idea how much of a CMs time is taken by that kind of stuff, I'm only guessing here, but I don't think it's insignificant.
    – Mad Scientist
    Jun 15, 2020 at 22:20
  • I don't even need an inside view for this; you can look at any number of organizations that've tried automating their way out of skilled labor, @Journeyman. The choice SE is facing isn't between hiring and equivalent automation; it's "some" automation or nothing: tasks just getting dropped because there's nothing & no one to do them. Both have already been happening for 3 years, as you well know - and you can probably guess at the relative proportions of each.
    – Shog9
    Jun 15, 2020 at 22:50
  • And well over the last 3 years and more, I am increasingly convinced that strategy might be harmful. It's downsizing stuff that has worked well for the community, on the promise of automation lowering workloads.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Jun 15, 2020 at 23:22
26

Hi Teresa, thank you for posting this! We have wanted a clear picture of company structure for a long time, and this is a simple but clear explanation.

One question: do you have any oversight over the marketing/blog people? Because they can have an impact on our sites (for example, choosing non-representative questions, acting as if they determine site scopes), and it can take a long time to get their attention (three months for one of my requests).

Improve this answer
1
  • 9
    I would say right now we have a partnership with the marketing team. In not so recent past, it has mainly been reactive. We are working to put process into place that includes reviewing content directed at the community, but its a challenge with the existing workload and number of team members to cover everything we want to.
    – Teresa Dietrich StaffMod
    Jun 12, 2020 at 15:13

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .