Who is on the Community Management Team, and what does it do?

Question

The members of the Community Management Team (sometimes referred to as the Community Team or CMs) are employees of Stack Exchange the company, but not all SE employees are Community Management Team members. When visiting the profile of staff members there is an orange label indicator of that on their page, but since not all staff members are CMs, how do I recognize the CMs?

Also, what is their role on these sites? Are they moderators?

What is their relationship to the "Community" user?

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Answer 1

Who is on the Community Management Team?

Here is the list of people who make up the Community Management Team (aka CM, CMs), in order of hire date:

Name	Flair (links to blog or article announcing them)	Subteam	Title
JNat		Community Engagement and Enablement (Team Lead)	Senior Community Manager
Cesar M		Trust & Safety (Team Manager) / Community Support (Team Manager)	Manager
Rosie		Community Engagement and Enablement (Team Manager)	Director
Philippe		VP of Community / Community Strategy (Team Manager)	Vice President of Community
Slate		Community Strategy	Senior Community Manager
Charlotte		Community Support	Community Manager
SpencerG		Community Engagement and Enablement	Community Manager
Bella_Blue		Trust & Safety	Senior Community Manager
Berthold		Community Strategy	Staff Community Manager
Dalmarus		Community Support (Team Lead)	Senior Community Manager
Emerson		Trust & Safety	Associate Community Manager
Sasha		Community Engagement and Enablement	Community Manager

What do they do?

The Community Management Team is part of the broader "Community Team", the staff members focused on the needs of the Stack Exchange communities and the strategy and planning for community initiatives. You can read more about the entire team in this post.

Explaining the breadth of what the CMs do is complicated and difficult to enumerate, but here are some of the things they've done and continue to do over the years:

• They help you out. No, really. But yeah, that's about the most generic non-answer ever.

• They review proposed sites passing through Area 51, revising, raising concerns, closing, destroying, and preparing for their launch as the situation warrants.

• They liaise with Stack Overflow’s product development teams, serving as a voice of the user and managing the community-facing communications.

• They moderate brand new sites as they launch, answer questions and attempt to communicate lessons learned on past sites. They run the process to obtain the initial set of Pro Tem mods, and hand the site off to them.

• They're the key outward facing representatives of the Stack Exchange upper administration.

• They watch the various and sundry meta sites, answer questions, address or escalate requests and provide guidance in the use of the site's tools.

• They occasionally answer emails.

• They review moderator actions, offer advice, resolve disputes.

• Now and then, they sleep. One eye open. Like birds.

Are they moderators?

While CMs hold moderator privileges on every network site and much of their work touches on moderation, they are not part of the site moderator teams. No elected or appointed moderator is an employee of the company, while all CMs are. Some have gone from moderator -> employee and vice versa, but the orange "Staff" badges on their pages indicate clearly if they work for the company. If you're curious about who has made that switch, it's documented here.

Are they the same as the Community user?

No, they are not. The Community "user" is really used for when the system takes an action and the log needs to reflect which user did it (or is used as a placeholder when a user is removed). Community, for that reason, is designated as a Bot. Questions about actions taken by the system can be asked under the Community user tag: community-user.

What are these different teams they are part of?

There are four sub-teams within the Community Management team:

1. Community Engagement and Enablement – They focus on improving moderator tools and support, scheduling and managing elections, they create and execute experiments as well as plan and spec new tools, checking into oddities on the site, and generally being do-gooders.
2. Community Support – They answer the mail. They're the front line. They investigate tickets from moderators and others who write, and they watch for emergent patterns and handle them.
3. Trust and Safety – They're Batman. You'll never know they're there, until you spot what they've done. They handle anything related to keeping our users safe and our content high quality.
4. Community Strategy – They’re focused on the next six to twelve months, and how the team can get ahead of the huge demands on our time. They’re thinking about the next major product launch, and they eat data for breakfast.

There is also a VP. He manages one of the subteams (Strategy), but he describes himself as mostly running around the network making a nuisance of himself.