Before jumping into the details, I first want to thank everyone who worked to come up with our updated Code of Conduct. I appreciate the amazing efforts of our staff, led by our Trust and Safety Manager, Cesar, and Senior Community Manager, Bella_Blue, who steered this effort. I particularly want to recognize the collaboration from the Stack Exchange moderators and community members who provided their feedback over the last few months. 

While we are confident that the updates to the Code of Conduct are a step in the right direction, we also acknowledge that it is not a magical solution that will instantly enhance the quality of discourse across the network. We understand that conflicts and disputes may still arise, and trolls will continue to exist. However, the Code of Conduct will equip us with the necessary tools to remind each other to treat one another with respect and clearly outline our expectations, expressing our vision for a respectful and healthy community.

While we encourage everyone to review the entire Code of Conduct, below are some background and key highlights: 

Dedication to constant improvement

We last updated our Code of Conduct in 2019, and since then, the world has shifted dramatically. Our updated Code of Conduct provides specific guidelines on things like dangerous iconography and harmful political speech, as well as helps ensure conversations around things like public health remain evidence-based. We firmly believe that growth and progress go hand in hand. As we evolve and adapt to the ever-changing landscape, ensuring that our Code of Conduct remains relevant and applicable to the community is a top priority. 

In addition to this commitment to constantly improve the applicability of the Code, we are tracking upcoming regulatory pressures globally (notably from Brazil and the EU), and it is imperative that we reflect those potential requirements in our Code of Conduct.

What to expect from our updated Code of Conduct

Our updated Code of Conduct includes our mission statement, details our expectations for users, and provides details into what is unacceptable behavior as well as instructions on how to report such behavior. You can expect links to a comprehensive set of guidelines that reflect our core values and address the evolving needs of our community. We have thoroughly reviewed and refined the document to ensure it provides clear and actionable guidance for all users.

Enhancing user experience and safety

The Code of Conduct strives to enhance the user experience and ensure the safety of every individual who engages with our platform. Our Code of Conduct includes measures to combat harassment, hate speech, and other forms of inappropriate content, empowering us to create an environment that fosters respect and inclusivity. 

A collaborative effort

A Code of Conduct is a handshake agreement between users and the company and is a collaborative effort that involves the invaluable insights of the community. We have actively engaged with moderators and the community, seeking their perspectives and expertise. Their contributions have been instrumental in shaping this update, ensuring that it reflects the diverse needs and voices of the community.

Thank you for being an integral part of our journey as we continue to evolve, improve, and uphold our shared values. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we work together to create a world-class experience for everyone in the Stack Overflow community.

The post Building a safer community: Announcing our new Code of Conduct appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

In the responses to my series of questions to the community on Meta Stack Exchange, a fairly consistent theme was a desire for more information more frequently, but also a desire to see how all the pieces fit together. How does the work of the Community Team, for instance, tie to work happening across the organization? I’m going to make a concerted effort over the next year to bring you more of that explanatory flavor.

A few months ago, I presented our roadmap for Q3, and Q4 was very… missing. So here’s the modified Q3/Q4 community roadmap:

Essentially, we’re taking on five new projects for Q4, and wrapping up a couple of stragglers from Q3.  We’ve also temporarily shelved a project (Mod Lifecycle and Tenure—the “emeritus” program) for want of the development resources that we need.  We’ll revisit it early in 2022.

Three of these projects are community-facing (my “standing offer,” the Mod Quick Start Guide, and the Winter Bash), but you will notice that the other two are specifically called out as research programs with no programmatic changes. For those programs, you will not see any changes in policy or practice—as it says, they are for our own research purposes only.  

Let’s take a look at the projects one by one:

• My standing offer: Today I released details to the mod teams (on their private team) about my “standing offer.” I am committing to meet with any mod team that wants to talk to me, and to discuss issues of importance for them or to update them on the work of the Community team. There are some pre-conditions: more details in the teams post. This project is being coordinated by the Curator Support team.

• Moderator’s Quick Start Guide: We envision that this will present practical advice on how to use moderation tools and moderation theory for a mod who’s just taking up this role. This is not envisioned to be a comprehensive handbook on moderation: it’s a concise version for a new mod who doesn’t have much time. This is also a Curator Support project.

• Winter Bash: We’ve already begun ramping up support for Winter Bash. This is a fun project that the team looks forward to each year. I can’t wait to see what they come up with this December. If you aren’t familiar with Winter Bash, check out last year’s post. This is a Community Operations team project.

• Research: Weighted Close Votes: Catija will be driving a project on whether or not to provide extra weight to votes to close and reopen when they are from certain contributors, or those meeting a particular set of qualifications – similar to gold tag badges and duplicate closures. The first question is whether we should do this or not and, if so, the second question is how. This is an information-gathering project so that we can talk about it in a data-driven way and will rely heavily on discussions and feedback from the community. This is also a Community Operations team project.

• Research: Dependencies on Chat: I’ve been amazed at the amount of things that are integrating into our chat systems. So we’re going to make a comprehensive list of systems that integrate to chat. This is everything from my team’s own escalation and work handling bots up to the Charcoal spam-fighting network’s systems. This project will be run by Slate, who is temporarily seconded to the Trust and Safety team for this project (which ordinarily would be run by Trust and Safety, but we haven’t quite completed the hiring and onboarding process for their new team members yet).

Project work like this ideally takes up about 20% of the team’s time. Most of the remaining 80% is taken up in handling tickets from mods, some regular ongoing work (the mod survey, onboarding new team members, interviewing, etc.), and providing internal consulting to the rest of the organization. 

So that’s the plan for Q4, and since it’s now done and published (and early at that!), I suppose that means it’s time to get started on planning for 2022! I welcome your feedback, of course, and any ideas that you have for 2022, either here in comments, in answers on Meta, or by email to me: [myfirstname] [at] stackoverflow [dot] com.

The post The Loop: Our Community department roadmap for Q4 2021 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

I’ve been working with online communities since the days of AOL chat rooms, and have held community roles at Wikipedia and Reddit. You can hear more about my experience and why I’m so excited for this opportunity in this recent podcast episode.

Ok, enough about me. I’m going to take you through what the Community Management and Public Platform teams accomplished in Q2 and what to expect during Q3.

Q2 2021 recap

Our Community Management team – directly supporting moderators, curators, and the general user base – is growing and changing! We’ve added two new community managers, have two more starting in August, and have moved one staff member (me) to a VP role. We’re also opening up two positions on Trust and Safety, the sub-team that investigates various threats to the site and behavioral issues. Check out the job posting and apply if you are qualified!

Q2 was a busy time for us. 

On the community project side, we completed a number of initiatives: we reset the community ads program, wrote guidance for mods about how to use the mod tools, and began research into reasons for closed questions. We also rewrote some mod templates that were unclear or outdated. The changes will be rolled out to the public platform soon. Along with projects handled largely by our team, we also supported a number of other initiatives throughout the company, such as the deployment of Collectives and the 2021 Dev Survey. Last but not least, after a successful launch last year, we’re excited to be supporting the 2nd annual “Community-a-thon” for staff right now.

Meanwhile, Public Platform, the product development team that builds features for Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange communities, accomplished the following in Q2:

• launched a crazy-fun April Fool’s prank that produced some interesting insights.
• wrapped up a multi-quarter initiative to make it easier for Community Managers (CMs) to manage moderator elections.
• released onboarding guidance to make it easier for both new and experienced users to understand how Review Queues, our system for handling problematic posts, work.
• continued product discovery on the issue of outdated answers on Stack Overflow by collecting and analyzing a data set of less-than-optimal answers.

Q3 2021 Community Management team roadmap

Below are the major initiatives we’ll be focusing on in Q3. 

Community Operations

Moving some support tickets to Community Ops

For the operations team, led by Rosie, one major piece of work that’s happening is that we’re taking over a large support responsibility. For the last half-decade or so, the Stack Overflow support team has been triaging and handling community support emails that really should be handled by community managers. It’s a decent sized lift — about 2,000 a month — and it will require that we update our existing templates as well. 

Three vote closure adaptation

We will also continue our experiments with the three-vote closure adaptation, which allows for three votes on a close/reopen task rather than the customary five. We ran a pilot program for this last quarter, and we’re into an analysis phase at this point, prior to making decisions about where and how to implement the adjustment.

Site life-cycle analysis

I know that many of you will be thrilled to know that we’re looking at site lifecycles – from the beginning of the nascent site in Area 51 through the beta process and into graduation as a “full” site. We’ll be trying to standardize some practices for sites to establish a clean and clear roadmap for new sites. We are also hoping to create a fair and repeatable process for evaluating sites that are in danger of being shut down.  This will include determining what the process should be for having their members join a similar community (while importing their questions and reputation there). A component of this work is evaluating sites that are currently flagged as “beta” and determining whether they should have that label removed.

Trust and Safety

New employee onboarding refresh

We’re updating a ton of documentation for new team members. The “ramp” time to get a new hire to become fully functional as a community-facing Stack employee is a long one, but history tells us that the better organized and carefully crafted the onboarding process, the easier onboarding is for new teammates. Trust and Safety work has traditionally not been an area of focus for us, so Cesar’s team will be helping to update the onboarding process to reflect their work and to give solid advice to those who join the company.

Closed question reasons 

The T&S team is also working on evaluating closed questions and the reasons why they are closed. They’re looking into whether it makes sense to standardize some options for this — for instance, should all sites have an option to close questions for a particular set of reasons? If so, what should those reasons be? What are the requirements to have a question reopened once closed under those reasons? Once this work is done, they will work to create a set of guidelines for closing that are standardized across the network.

Oh, and with a little bit of luck, we will onboard a couple of new community managers to this team as well. 

Curator Support

At the same time, the curator support team, led by Juan, will continue its focus on our moderators and power users. This quarter, they’ll be onboarding two new community managers, in addition to their standard work (mod surveys, swag, mod/staff quarterly meeting), so they will take on only one additional project: mod tenure (the emeritus program), which is a project that looks at the overall arc of tenure for moderators. It also looks at ways to honor those who have done excellent work for the communities they serve for some time who may wish to step down. 

This will likely form the corpus of a “moderator emeritus” program, one which will allow communities to recognize and honor those who have served as moderators, while also giving them a consistent and recognizable stable of mentors for new mods and new users. We will recognize these emeritus moderators with some icon similar to the diamond that mods wear today. They will also retain access to a more limited set of the moderator tools, to allow them to surge in and support existing moderators if needed, but also allow them a graceful transition out of the role.

Q3 2021 Public Platform roadmap

These are our top priorities for Q3.

Review queues

We are wrapping up the final phase of this longstanding project by making changes to how posts flow through the various queues. This includes:

• splitting up the First posts queue into First questions and First answers, so that experienced users can more easily evaluate the quality of new users’ posts.
• redesigning how closed posts become eligible for reopening.
• Making it easier for reviewers to take concrete actions in the First questions, First answers, and Late answers queues.

Outdated answers

We are continuing our product-discovery work on Stack Overflow answer quality by conducting experiments related to how we sort answers. We will be testing the effect of sorting by highest score vs. pinning the answer that the question asker viewed as most helpful to the top. This is a long-standing community request that we hope to finally address. We will also be exploring the concept of a Trending sort that weights recent votes more heavily than older votes.

New user onboarding

We are continuing product discovery on how to best guide new users through the process of successfully asking their first questions. We will experiment with the copy shown to new users when asking questions to help them learn about site mechanics and successfully complete their tasks. In addition, we’re conducting extensive research on different ways new users can engage with the Stack Overflow community and get the support and information they need to start off on the right foot.

Stacks editor alpha test

In Q1, we kicked off an alpha test to get feedback from the community on what is needed to bring a new editor experience to the network. Based on the feedback we received, we are making incremental progress on tackling bugs and feature requests.

….and straight on toward morning *

It’s going to be a very full quarter, and I’m particularly excited that in addition to the two new CMs recently hired, we’ll be adding four more to the team. We’re looking both inside and outside the Stack community for qualified candidates – as a reminder, we’ve got the job description and application posted, so please apply if you’re qualified!  

On a personal note, as this blog post is being published, I am finishing the first thirty days of my new role as VP of Community, and I want to particularly thank my team, the whole staff, but especially all the community members who have so patiently answered my questions and given me great ideas and feedback. I look forward to meeting many more of you!

^{* –}(with apologies to Chindraba).

Please note: we welcome your feedback on these roadmaps on meta.

The post The Loop: Our Community & Public Platform Roadmap for Q3 2021 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.