The SO blog page Introducing “The Loop”: A Foundation in Listening entry states:
A month ago we formed cross-functional teams of Stackers (employees of Stack Overflow) to create strategies to start addressing some of these concerns. It’s been inspiring to see people from our Community Management team work hand in hand with folks from Engineering, Sales, and Marketing to come up with solutions for our community’s most pressing concerns. We’ve worked together to build new communication frameworks that take into account how we’ve scaled and to replace old frameworks that don’t work now that we’re larger.
The themes these groups took on are:
- Better mechanisms for community feedback
- Building a moderator advisory group
- How we communicate and interact with Meta sites moving forward
I find it troubling that they seem to be taking a top-down approach only to "come up with solutions for our community's most pressing concerns". They've worked with different groups within the company, but have given no indication (and I've not seen any particular evidence either) that they've asked, or even tried to work with, members of the "community", i.e., most of the people reading this, about what "we" consider to be our biggest problems and how any of their suggestions about how the company can best solve "our" problems will be successful or not.
Another example of their top-down approach is regarding their feedback mechanisms, where they write:
That’s why we’re creating a working group of users made up of people from all corners of the developer community — from folks new to programming, those who don’t participate in Stack Overflow but are passionate about programming, experienced Stack Overflow users, frequent contributors, and more. We’ll hand-select folks of diverse backgrounds who are excited to chat with us regularly about everything from new ideas to features, to how we communicate with the broader Stack Overflow community.
I added the emphasis on "hand-select". Instead of perhaps having an election or some other community-based selection method of determining who "we" believe can best represent & communicate our needs to the company, they will make their own choices. Although they may perhaps make good choices, I believe they will likely not choose anybody who decides to question what they're doing too much. An excellent example is a certain former moderator who, it seems based on the best information I can find, was fired and later even slandered in public for doing this.
Nonetheless, being an optimist, I hope that what they implement will help improve, at least in general, the situation for us, plus where it does not, they will realize this (e.g., through their survey or feedback from their "hand-selected" group) and then try to improve the situation.