Community-a-thon 2024 kicks off on October 18th

Question

TL;DR:

• Our fifth Community-a-thon will kick off on October 18, 2024 and continue until October 23, 2024.
• This is an annual event where staff at Stack Overflow are encouraged to participate on the Stack Exchange network.
• The scale of the event is consistent with last year’s Community-a-thon.

What is Community-a-thon?

This is an event we hold for the staff at Stack Overflow. During the course of the event, employees are encouraged to participate on sites in the Stack Exchange network, in order to increase their familiarity with the public sites and experience things from the perspective of a community member. This is the fifth year we've held the event, and you can see our previous posts, like this one from 2023, as well as the ones from other past Community-a-thons.

The goals for the event are:

1. Improve empathy between all Stack Overflow employees and our sites and communities.
2. Achieve a high degree of participation during the event, that can hopefully carry on afterwards as well.
3. Increase our collective familiarity with our core product and elicit useful feedback on actionable ways to improve our functionality and user experience.

Similar to previous Community-a-thons, the event will include a competition in which participants can receive points based on engagement and activities done on network sites during the contest. We will not have a dedicated chat room for the event, but we are letting Stackers (what we call Stack Overflow employees) who are less familiar with the Stack Exchange network know about chat, so don't be surprised if you see some newer Stackers in the Tavern or in some of the site-specific chat rooms.

Some Stackers may be participating with their staff accounts, while others may be using brand-new accounts. We're encouraging staff to create new accounts or use accounts with low rep on sites so they can better understand the new user experience. Those participating, regardless of whether they are using newer or established accounts, are encouraged to submit their feedback, observations, and experiences over the course of the event.

The scale this year

Like last year, Community-a-thon is primarily being driven by the Community Management and People Operations teams, and will run for several days (October 18-23rd), rather than weeks as we have done in the past. We want to allow Stackers across all areas of the company to gain insight into the new user experience without pulling them away from their day-to-day work of supporting and strengthening the platform.

Community is the core of Stack Exchange, and this event is an opportunity for staff who aren’t as involved on the network to become familiar with them and the community. It’s also an opportunity for staff who are regularly engaged on the network to see things through the lens of a community member.

We’re giving you this heads up because the community has given us great feedback over the years around staff participation during the event. Similar to last year, we will have an internal info session for staff, and community managers will be around to help newer members out if they have questions. We also plan to post a recap here a few weeks after the event, as we did last year.

If you have any questions related to the event or its goals, feel free to ask in an answer below.

Answer 1

We're encouraging staff to create new accounts or use accounts with low rep on sites so they can better understand the new user experience

Ask a few of these testers to download the entire SE data dump (entire = for all sites) so that they can assess the new SE data dump experience, and let's hear their feedback.

Answer 2

elicit useful feedback on actionable ways to improve our functionality and user experience

I'd also encourage participating staff who encounter functionality or usability issues to search on MSO and/or MSE. Ex. is:q [bug] [feature-request] -[status-completed] .... I'm 10% joking here and 90% being genuine that I think finding out that the thing bothering you or that you want to change has already been brought up several years ago- maybe multiple times- is an (unhappily) integral part of the user experience here (though not necessarily unique to SO/SE). I think the value in that is in learning our perspective that many basic things we want are stuck in backlog hell or whatever name it has if it can't be called a backlog (of course, Community Asks sprints are helping, and I greatly appreciate them).

Answer 3

I'd note that the post is broadly similar to last year's. In my role as a Pets moderator — I noticed some activity from staff during the event, but very little to none between the previous and up-coming community-a-thon.

Achieve a high degree of participation during the event, that can hopefully carry on afterwards as well.

With this as a goal — what's being done differently to enable/encourage/activate folks to stick around after the event?

Answer 4

Something with the Community-a-thon event has been bothering me since it began, and I could never put my finger on what, exactly.

I still can't, but trying this time to at least share it, and perhaps reach some enlightenment while writing, or with help of others.

You see, in its core it's a good thing. Good intentions, good people, good outcome.

After reading now what Dan Mašek wrote here:

what is it that's so fundamentally broken in the company that you have to organize a competition with prizes to get your own employees to actually use your flag product?

I gave it more thought, about my own past and present thoughts, and it's still not that. I don't expect all the company employees to use Stack Exchange sites, it's not a shirt or a mobile device. I do expect those who should engage the community to use the sites, or at least be active, and there there is a big failure, however that's a topic for different discussion.

So, Shadow, what's going on? Perhaps adding something Journeyman Geek wrote here:

some activity from staff during the event, but very little to none between the previous and up-coming community-a-thon

Bingo! The employees who take part don't do it because they really want to, or intended to do that by themselves. They do it as part of their job.

This is not bad. The outcome is still good. But that's what bothering me, and wanted to share and remove it from my shoulders.

Answer 5

What fascinates me is the following snippets:

• "an annual event where staff at Stack Overflow are encouraged to participate on the Stack Exchange network"
• "Increase our collective familiarity with our core product"
• "event will include a competition"

Honestly, what is it that's so fundamentally broken in the company that you have to organize a competition with prizes to get your own employees to actually use your flag product? (It's hardly the only mind-boggling aspect of your operations, but definitely one of the more prominent ones.)

Back when I worked on a system used on a roughly similar scale used by general public, we "ate our dogfood" all the time -- our product was the primary means of communication across the entire company, everyone used it every day. Obviously, yours is a less universal tool, but still, how (or why) did you manage to not make it a crucial part of how you operate? You even try to sell the system to others to use internally, yet you don't? What's up with that, and how do you explain that to your potential customers? Why do people even work there, if they don't give a hoot about your flag product?

Answer 6

I think I've asked this before, in connection with other Community-a-Thons, but I'm going to ask it again.

Why do you need special events to encourage employees to participate on the sites and to become familiar with the people and communities that they help support?

Every employee should be given time during their workday to participate on network sites.

To encourage this, if one or more network sites that map to a job function or role within the company exist, then the company should map those sites to the roles and communicate that to employees. However, if no sites are related to their role at the company or the employee chooses to do so, they can participate on any site in the network.

Most people should be able to find at least one site to participate on, either related to their role at the company or some outside interest. And, like their participation in the Community-a-Thon, it doesn't need to be done using an account that indicates they are staff.

Participation should be defined as any user activity: asking questions, answering questions, leaving comments, voting, editing, working through the review queues. The minimum expected bar for participation should be low, but non-zero, so people get an understanding but do not generate low quality content. Generating content to meet evaluation criteria would not serve anyone's interest here.

Converting staff to contributors and curators in good standing by encouraging a steady level of effort would be far more beneficial to the communities than a week-long event once a year or so.