Are you interested in Prompt Design? Join the Community Stakeholders group

Question

Update #2

As promised, you can follow along for summarized updates on the work the stakeholder group is undertaking.

You can find that here

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Update #1

Thank you to everyone who took the time to throw your hat in the ring. It looks like just about everyone was accepted. I have made invites to everyone who met the requirements.

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Introducing the Community Stakeholders Group

We're excited to invite you to join the Community Stakeholders group for our new Prompt Design Stack Exchange site. (Please read the linked post first for more information about the site and its planned launch process.)

This group will be crucial to the site's success and ongoing development. As we bypass the Area 51 process and move directly to Public Beta, the Community Stakeholders will draft preliminary guidance, establish site norms, and set best practices from the outset. Activity that would have taken place during a private beta phase.

What Would Stakeholders Be Doing?

This group would be acting as the replacement for the committers phase in the typical Area 51 process. Specifically, they would think about the following:

• Site scope
• Off-topic questions
• Engagement initiatives
• Moderation
• Early moderation of the site (Moderation by appointment, or CMs moderate until an election can be held)
• Ethical boundaries for certain content types
• How to handle subjective content

What the stakeholder group is not

This group is not designed to replace moderators, curators, or anyone else. This group does not have binding power to govern the site, just the charter to do the groundwork so that it can be ready at launch – at which point the broader community is free to debate, dismantle, and create any site-specific policy, just like they would anywhere else.

We hope to create an active group, made up of the earliest supporters of having a Prompt Design site on SE. At this stage, we are experimenting to see how working with such a group may impact the site trajectory. These individuals are not granted any special tools or powers. This is just to help get a site off the ground.

How Will Community Managers (CMs) Be Involved?

CMs will be strong partners with the Stakeholder group, providing resources and support. They will hold recurring office hours for stakeholders to bounce ideas off of, plan out policy ideas, discuss moderation norms for the site's particular subject matter, or anything else that could be useful. While the Stakeholder group won't make permanent policy and governance decisions, they will lay temporary blueprints for the community to engage with and modify once the site launches.

Who Should Join the Community Stakeholders Group?

We're looking for people who are excited about a new site in a new field and are interested in working closely with CMs. You don't need to be a moderator, curator, or the most seasoned user – you just need to be in good standing on the network, passionate, committed, and willing to get your hands dirty forming a community. You also don’t need to be an expert on prompt design or using GenAI, but you should be interested in the topic.

How Will the Community Stakeholders Group Operate?

We'll keep the process as transparent as possible. Meetings will be annotated, notes published, and chat transcripts viewable publicly. We will keep a living record on MSE in one post where all of this will live and be continually updated until the conclusion of the stakeholder group.

We expect the need for the group's existence and its relevance to decrease after the first few months as the community stabilizes, with members assimilating into the site's community as active users and moderators. We see this group as a temporary one to help get the site off the ground; at some point, the group will be no longer needed and shut down.

How to Join the Community Stakeholders Group

If you're interested in joining, and you have a reputation score of 300 or more on any site in the network and have been in good standing for the past year, feel free to post an answer to throw your hat in the ring; please tell us about yourself and why you think you'd be a good fit. Consider addressing the following points in your answer:

• Passion for the site's topic
• Commitment to fostering a positive, inclusive, and productive environment
• Willingness to collaborate and contribute to the site's growth and development

We will select some people to start with, and as things progress, we may add more members.

How will I know if I am selected?

Please have your submission in by the end of the day on July 4th UTC time. We will update this post on July 5th, 2023 to announce who has been selected and then formally invite them into the various spaces to begin work.

Answer 1

This group will be crucial to the site's success and ongoing development. As we bypass the Area 51 process and move directly to Public Beta, the Community Stakeholders will draft preliminary guidance, establish site norms, and set best practices from the outset. Activity that would have taken place during a private beta phase.

Maybe I missed it, but was there a reason for bypassing Area 51? Other than the company wanting to move fast to get on the AI hype train?

You don't need to be a moderator, curator, or the most seasoned user – you just need to be in good standing on the network, passionate, committed, and willing to get your hands dirty forming a community.

Can you clarify what you mean by good standing?

Consider addressing the following points in your answer:

• Passion for the site's topic
• Commitment to fostering a positive, inclusive, and productive environment
• Willingness to collaborate and contribute to the site's growth and development

Why does this need to be stated? Is your CoC unclear that you feel the need to repeat these buzzwords repeatedly?

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Again, not sure if I missed it but:

• How will you measure the site health?
• How long will this go on for?
• What determines success/failure for this site?

Or, will all these be decided by the group you're selecting?

Essentially, I'm wondering how much of this is already decided in the background by the company and is just a formality as opposed to being genuine.

Answer 2

It might send a better message to management if this proposed community succeeds or fails on its own merits, rather than simply because the company's thoroughly alienated (or fired) everyone who might have been able to help. I don't see that you'll have very many people to choose from, unless you meet the strike demands by your deadline.

I would be a bad pick for this "Community Stakeholders group", but I am not unwilling.

What would I be thinking about?

• Site scope: only with view to managing the overlap with other sites' scopes.

• Ethical boundaries for certain content types: somebody has to. The CM T&S team will catch a certain class of issues, and there is at least one person in the company who might catch this kind of thing, but I'm not confident anyone in the company actually understands transformers and diffusion models well enough to make general claims about their behaviour, and anticipate non-obvious ethical issues in advance.

  I also don't understand these systems as well as I'd like – but I have a decent grounding in the fundamentals (linear algebra, information theory, computational complexity theory), and a good enough intuition to have made successful advance predictions about the behaviour and capabilities of specific systems. Above all, I have the tendency to listen to experts and learn from them – an ability the company appears to lack at present.

• Early moderation of the site: if you pay me. You'll find my fees are quite reasonable.

What would I not be thinking about?

• Off-topic questions: the company clearly has a vision for this site. I do not think my opinions on this topic would be appreciated.
• Engagement initiatives: at the scale the company's hoping for, these are a very bad idea. I cannot in good faith support that.
• Moderation: owing to the ongoing general moderation strike, I will not be sharing my expertise gratis. (Collectively, the currently-employed CMs have me thoroughly beat, so this is no great loss.)
• How to handle subjective content: I can only think of 10 or so objective questions, and I can think of no good subjective questions. Handling subjective content on this proposed site seems like a very hard problem, and not one I am well-equipped for.

I am willing to relay other people's concerns about these topics. (It's that whole "listening to experts" thing again.)

Additional criteria

• Passion for the site's topic: I am definitely… passionate about the topic.
• Commitment to fostering a positive, inclusive, and productive environment: Yes.^†
• Willingness to collaborate and contribute to the site's growth and development: I would prefer the site to do well than not well; I think that this is not synonymous with growth, but I will not stand in anyone's way if they Know Better. I am willing to collaborate,^† and I do not intend to take positive action to sabotage the site.

†: Moreso than the company appears to be – despite the very hard work of certain individuals. (I'm sure I don't even know the half of it.)

Answer 3

Since I fear the comment I made could not be visible enough, I am posting this answer to.

The group has been called "Stakeholder". A weird word choice that carries a corporate weight with it. While multiple levels of "Stakeholders" exist, the first thing I think when reading this word is someone that in a way "shares the risk" of the project failure.
I wonder if this was a deliberate choice: based on the plan I would have preferred some other name like "ambassadors", "evangelists" (think Microsoft), "early adopters" etc.

Recently as an external observer I got the feeling that serving as a moderator on the network is like walking with a big target on your back. As I said in my comment:

You get to know alarming stuff but since it is secret you can't talk about it even when something different is said on Meta. You risk getting shamed on media sites. Sometime you end up seen as an enemy or have to resort to actual strike to be heard.

I therefore wonder... will the member of this group be required to sign any form of agreement like the moderators currently do?
And if that is the case, what would the agreement require from them? Why would that not be mentioned upfront?

Answer 4

I'm willing to participate once the moderation strike ends while there is a clear policy to keep the site free of social, cultural, economic and political controversies.

I have posted and participated in questions related to prompt engineering on SO and SE sites. As we have seen, the AI hype is flooding the web with content, making it hard to separate "plausible" from really good content.

I might say that I need clarification about what you mean by inclusive environment, as there is a lot of noise on the web around inclusive policies.

I'm in favor of working with people from any place in the world and any background; I'm in favor of having workings to facilitate the participation of all members while the participation ground rules be properly set and enforced.

Some of my posts related to "prompt design"

• What tags might help me find questions about "prompt engineering"? (Stack Overflow Meta)
• Are "prompt engineering" and "prompt design" used as synonymous? (Artificial intelligence)
• Answer to What would be the appropriate community to ask questions about prompt engineering? (Like for GPT-3 or Stable Diffusion.) (Meta Stack Exchange)

Answer 5

Passion for the site's topic

I'm very passionate. I enthusiastically steep myself in this world every day. Currently, I'm a lead product manager at Kaggle, a Google company and community platform for ML competitions, datasets, code, and models. You may also remember me as a former product manager at Stack Overflow where I worked on public Q&A (this is how I got my reputation on the site ... does it count?).

We're in the early days of a new paradigm for ML (or AI, if you want). The data and compute aren't just bigger. They're so big, we reached an inflection point where how ML can be done and how it can be applied looks qualitatively different today than it did a year ago. There's a whole new "stack" for working with this technology that's still nascent, but will definitely mature. And I've been eagerly watching to see how Stack Overflow responds to changes in the ways developers and users of this technology work. A Prompt Design site sounds great, but maybe it could be bigger in scope? Regardless, I'm personally much more excited by the potential to positively impact developers along these lines than any small applications of generative AI that Stack Overflow is playing around with.

I'll leave more thoughts for later if you'd like them. Hopefully this is enough to convey my sincere enthusiasm for the site topic.

Commitment to fostering a positive, inclusive, and productive environment

Yes. (Read that as "Yes, period"). I don't have much else to add to this one!

Willingness to collaborate and contribute to the site's growth and development

I'm willing, but I have my own reservations which I'll be transparent about. I'm busy with life and my day job and I'm not an expert at community building at the same level as many people here (although I am passionate about communities and do of course work on another technical community product). But, I may be able to offer some domain-relevant perspective that could be valuable. I'd also be specifically interested in "engagement initiatives" depending on what it means.

If I felt my input were not contributing enough to project goals relative to the effort spent (for any reason, e.g., lack of alignment, stressful chaos, my ideas turn out to be terrible), I would recuse myself and cheer for successful outcomes from the sidelines.

Answer 6

I'm cocomac - Once the strike ends, I'd like to join the Community Stakeholders for Prompt Design SE. I'm over 300 rep on several sites, including Ask Ubuntu, Stack Overflow, and Meta Stack Exchange, and I'm in good standing (I haven't been suspended).

I was one of the users that helped give feedback on and shape the Staging Ground - I enjoyed collaborating with fellow users, mods, and staff to have a meaningful impact on a new feature aimed at bettering Stack Overflow. Prior to the strike, I also was a participant in Charcoal. I'm also regularly in chat.

While I'm critical of some of the recent AI-related decisions by SE, I'm interested in a community focused on responsibly prompting LLMs/generative AI models. I'm also interested in AI/ML more generally.

Ensuring an inclusive and collaborative community is crucial for the success of an SE site, and I'd try to ensure that happens. I personally believe in Assume good intent, the theory that it's better to assume people have a good reason and have good intentions, unless there is solid evidence to the contrary. I also value leading by example - when Stakeholders and community leaders are kind and open-minded, that encourages other users to also be open-minded and considerate.

Answer 7

Bump: Okay, let me add my name to the hat. I'm a long-term user and mod of two sites (just look at my profile; my previous account dates back from MathOverflow 1.0 days), and I'm passionate about helping people and making the Internet a better place. I still pine for the idealism of the fledgling Stack Exchange---the purity of people simply helping one another.

I'm a geriatric millennial, so have seen multiple technologies change the world (the Internet, Google, Wikipedia, email, mobile phones), while others were mostly hype (blockchain, the Metaverse, and probably others I've forgotten about). I don't know if GenAI is or isn't mostly hype, but I get the feeling it's going to become as essential/assumed a skill as Microsoft Excel.

A site for users of generative AI seems like it could have a place at Stack Exchange, especially given this post at AI Meta:

But right now, I'd lean more towards saying that prompt design / prompt engineering questions would often be off-topic here. Our site is primarily about AI itself, not about how to use tools that run AI internally, if that makes sense. --- Dennis Soemers, AI mod (score: 7).

Trying to figure out the scope is why I asked: What questions might you ask at Prompt Design? It's hard to know whether or not I can be useful without a clear idea of what the site's about. If the community decides to go in a different direction than above, I may not be the right person for the job. We'll see.

(Oh, and can we rename "community stakeholder" to "site pioneer" please? I do not hold stake.)

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Regarding the strike: I'm not intending to cross a picket line here. Strikers are not demanding that Prompt.SE fails (right?)---there is going to be a time in the near future when a compromise is reached: I agree the heavy moderation needed to be toned down to something more sustainable, but completely neutering moderators takes it to the other extreme. Using the red herring of AI detectors was, and remains, misleading and rude.

I understand I'd be taking the risk of wasting time: helping to curate a site only for some king-like authority at Stack Exchange to steal everyone's hard work with the snap of their fingers: "Thanks, we'll take it from here." (In Chinese, this is called 过河拆桥: "When someone abandons those who helped them upon realizing their goal".)

I try to maintain a healthy detachment with Stack Exchange (the company); they are a for-profit business, so you can't be any more surprised when they prioritize profit (over contributors, legacy, etc.), than you can be when a scorpion stings a frog. Yet at the end of the day, there is still a Q&A site which I can use for free and try to help people and learn things, and it is hosted and maintained using some of the money our contributions make. Not all their decisions are going to go my way. (Besides, I still use e.g. Facebook, and that's orders of magnitude more immoral than Stack Exchange.)

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First, I have a question. Are you open to changes in scope, and the name of the site? I think the basic motivation is

GenAI exists---let's make a Q&A site about it!

and hence "Prompt Design" was conceived. (It's not clear how fleeting the concept of "prompt design" will be---in a year or two, maybe it'll sound outdated.) We don't want it to cover the entirety of AI and machine learning ("is this a cat or a dog?") as this is AI.SE territory. We just want questions along the lines of:

As a user, how do I get GenAI to do what I want it to do?

Three key words: generative, AI, user.

Refining the scope would be the first thing I'd focus on, but afterwards you may not have a "Prompt Design" site; perhaps you'd have a "Using Generative AI" site (although maybe the site could be given a catchy name like "Prompt"). So maybe the tagline could be:

Prompt is for users of generative AI.

I feel that having a clearer scope will make the site more likely to succeed.

However, I'm worried the company would overrule a (hypothetical) community decision to tweak the scope from "prompt design" and the name of the site from "Prompt Design". Stack Exchange (the company) is opaque at times, and make decisions which appear irrational and self-defeating (at least from a community standpoint), so I cannot exclude the possibility that an authority will make an executive decision and veto well-thought-out community decisions.

If it's the case that decisions have already been made despite not being announced, and this whole process is only about appearing to involve the community, then I don't want to waste my time.

Answer 8

It's a shame this experiment with a new process overlaps the company pushing through a site with such a controversial (at the moment) topic. Creating a standing stakeholder group to launch a site and shepherd it through beta is an improvement over the current "commitment" phase.

Having a private teams instance and a commitment of CM support to work out details before going public is a good thing. I don't think it's great to take applications that seem like they will be screened by the company, although I understand why it's being done in this situation (a trial run). In the future, it would be better to have an automated process so that anyone who meets the requirements and will agree to some set of obligations can join the group during the commitment phase. This would also sidestep this nonsense where people’s applications to be part of the group are getting downvoted on a site where those downvotes count against their reputation. There’s no reason why applications need to be public if the community’s feedback on them isn’t being solicited.

The essay part of the application where people have to convince the company they're worthy of donating their time to create a product for y'all leaves a bad taste for me, and promulgates this attitude that community volunteers work for the company. If y'all need to decide which volunteers to "hire" for a team you're building, you should compensate them with more than the satisfaction of making a site for you.

I do think having a stakeholder group with a dedicated team instance would be a good thing in the future when a proposed site on Area 51 has been defined well enough and attracted enough followers that it's ready to go on to the commitment phase. Having some process for "publishing" progress from the teams instance to a public spot on Area 51 would be an important part of keeping people who are interested in the site, but not able to commit the time to be a stakeholder, engaged.

Answer 9

There's currently a lot of community knowledge on the topic that's scattered between various blog/reddit posts, guides only available as Youtube videos, or Discord servers not indexed by search engines. I'm eager to see it brought together in a more accessible and structured format, so I'd like to be considered for the community stakeholders group.

I have enthusiasm for the topic; I've been messing with ML as a hobbyist for a few years (early fun project) and I've benefitted from using generative tools as part of my workflow (e.g: quickly creating scenes for an RPG game). Already have in mind some questions/answers that I think could be a good fit for the site and help with initial growth.

On the site's scope/purpose, I agree with Rebecca J. Stones' point and think expanding from "best practices for writing effective prompts" to include broader practical usage of generative tools (e.g: how to make use of techniques like DreamBooth or textual inversion), while avoiding the design/theory side that AI.SE already covers, would likely be a better direction for the site. Would definitely be interested in contributing to discussions around this and other topics to help make the site constructive and inclusive.

Answer 10

I am interested in joining.

• I am a moderator on two Stack Exchange sites.

• I coded my first neural network in 1999 and have been programming AI from time to time since then.

• My day job includes building tools based on LLMs and other types of AI.

In the past I have posted questions about Google Search and they got upvoted, I truly think Google Search is worth many questions/answers, so a site about LLMs (which are trickier to use than Google Search) is worth trying, I believe.

I like Area51 and would like to see more sites come out of it, but I am not against Stack Exchange fast-tracking some sites.

While Stack Exchange has its problems, the CC-BY-SA license at the bottom of each QA is really the most important thing from my point of view.

Answer 11

I consider myself not quite a good fit for this as I have no experience in participating any activities in SE before, but I still want to throw my hat into the ring anyway. I am a programmer by profession, and I am interested in GenAI even though I have used it rarely.

I have a reputation score of more than 300 in Stack Overflow site. However, I am not sure if I have been in good standing for the past year. I got some review suspensions in the past before, but not sure if they were in the range of the past year.

Passion for the site's topic

I am somewhat interested in the topic. I think this trend can persist for at least several years in this technology era. Some jobs have already been replaced by bots/automations, which lead me to think that GenAI may be a ladder for the next advanced features.

Commitment to fostering a positive, inclusive, and productive environment

I do not fully understand the whole statement here as English is not my primary language. I can only tell that I can commit with an average of 1 hour of my time daily for this duty. I expect that I can help the new site grow and improve more or less.

Willingness to collaborate and contribute to the site's growth and development

I am willing to collaborate and contribute for the site's success. I am ready to comply to any rules that do not conflict with my intention; otherwise I am also ready to quit any time.

Answer 12

I would like to join the Community Stakeholder's group for the new Prompt Design site.

While I'm not a huge contributor to Stack Exchange, I have been a member of StackOverflow for over 7 years and have 2000+ reputation (I also have over 300 reputation on Ask Ubuntu). I'm familiar with the overall StackExchange practices as well as the moderation activities.

I'm both interested in and an active user of generative AI and have some familiarity with the role that prompts play in LLMs. I'm part of a small, private Discord group among friends and colleagues who share suggestions for prompts and how they are using the tools in our personal and professional lives. We try and keep the topics generalized, and while it conversations aren't specific to prompt engineering, that area takes up a lot of what we discuss.

While I acknowledge the inherent risks in using LLMs and agree that best practices are needed, I also understand that the technology and its use are moving at an incredible speed and I agree that this is a good time for such a site.

I enjoy dialoguing through written posts and have a good feel for helping to clarify points and distill arguments or suggestions in an effort to reach a consensus. I enjoy working with others to craft policies and procedures, and while I haven't done this before on the scale of a Stack Exchange site, I have experience with this in smaller work and leisure settings.

Answer 13

I'd like to be a stakeholder / member and here's why:

• I'm engaged in prompt engineering (which is what it's called incidentally, not prompt design, even though... that is a bit of a vanity title... but I think over time it may become true engineering) on both recreational and professional levels
  • For a fun sample of my work, check out this GitHub repo
  • Professionally, I do this as an AI/ML consultant in the medical arena
• I am passionate about the topic because I believe the usefulness of AI fully depends upon it
• The success of any SE site is fully dependent on fostering a positive, inclusive, and productive environment - and I've been saying that since before it was popular, arguing for a Welcome Wagon and friendly culture before the radical paradigm shift about half a decade or so ago wherein the Welcome Wagon was created on Stack Overflow
• As demonstrated by my open source work and reputations across the network, I remain highly collaborative

Answer 14

I would like to join the group, if I'm not already too late to apply. I have been a member of stackexchange for a long time now so I have a decent understanding of how the site works. I have also been a member of a few beta sites and have seen how those communities have evolved and how the sites graduated. I have always been interested in generative ai so I think it would interesting to be a part of this and see how it plays out.

Answer 15

I step forward and eagerly nominate myself to partake and participate.

I strongly love and support the integration of contemporary AI tools into a variety of scenarios pertaining to information-technology.

I can update with more details if necessary.

I am active on Stack Exchange daily. You can contact me in advance, on Twitter for example, if you would like any sort of user feedback straight away. I’d love to join in the conversation.

I also believe profoundly in personal freedom and I would like to believe I can advocate a way for the users of the site to have what they want - alluding to those striking. I believe there are systems that can enable small groups to self-govern; so if a particular site wants to forbid AI, that can be perfectly manageable, and they don’t have to feel that the company is robbing them in any way of their preferred platform. I believe a way forward flexible enough to give people an “all of the above” option can be found. My only minor critique so far (probably being the naive misunderstanding of an outsider) is that the company hasn’t performed too well in terms of diplomacy - I completely like the ideas I’ve heard (so far), yet a contingency of the user base has become disgruntled, even to the point of striking, as you know. Perhaps a way of constantly showing leniency, tolerance, interest, and engagement with what the users want could help yourselves hugely - I am willing to be a part of that.

I can be a bridge between the users on both sides. I use AI heavily and collaborate with a few AI companies now, but I am an active, engaged, “normal” SE participant, who gets upvoted standardly, for my human-written, human-researched answers. I can be a bridge to both sides, and quell the sense of corporate indifference or divisiveness, that has arisen, perhaps. I’d love for you to contact me via Twitter. (The link is in my Stack Exchange profile). Thanks.