Community Signal

Online communities are can be essential for people impacted by illness. For those directly affected, their families, and support systems, these communities can provide a much needed place to share experiences, to vent, and to learn about different symptoms, treatments, and the intricacies of navigating the healthcare system. For our guest, Amanda Petersen, Planet Cancer provided such a community as she fought breast cancer in her early twenties.

Amanda has since continued to be an active contributor and moderator in online spaces dedicated to providing a safe and functional community for cancer survivors. In this conversation, she talks about the role that Planet Cancer played in her life in addition to why she felt motivated to start participating in r/breastcancer. The community exists and is functional because of its people –– people like Amanda that help to moderate the space and people that are looking to connect with others and find support in their journeys.

Whether a moderator takes a break or community members sadly pass away or move on, the rules that they have created and the space that they've fostered will continue to provide a meaningful community for cancer survivors.

Amanda and Patrick also discuss:

• Rules that are representative of the community they serve and protect
• The emotional labor of managing a community of care
• How Planet Cancer helped Amanda through her own journey with cancer

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

What makes a space for cancer survivors not functional? (12:27): "[After you have been in the] support community space for so long, there are certain things that you start IDing [that indicate] this is no longer a functional space for survivors. People flooding it when they're concerned about having cancer, while totally legitimate, will drive away your survivors. People asking for donation requests will drive away your survivors. People asking for research requests will drive away your survivors." –@amandarhiann

The important roles of active moderators in a subreddit (15:46): "Unless the moderators are paying attention, Reddit can be a very unsafe place for many reasons. With strong moderator teams, it can be a safe place of healing." –@amandarhiann

Why r/breastcancer does not allow pre-diagnosis posts (19:13): "Don't take advice about your health from someone at a grocery store, [and that also] applies to Reddit. [People] need to go to their doctor, and there are tons of pre-diagnosis resources out there that aren't going to force people who are actively going through treatment to answer questions they shouldn't have to answer." –@amandarhiann

The emotional tax of research requests for cancer survivors (21:04): "[r/breastcancer] is a place for helping people navigate the complexities of breast cancer. It's not a place to help other people do their jobs better. Sure, if you want to come and read [or] do text analysis on Reddit, go ahead, it's all public, but don't harm the people that we're trying to help, even inadvertently." –@amandarhiann

Amanda Petersen is the program manager for community operations at MURAL. Prior to working in community, Amanda spent ten years of her career helping people who used challenging behaviors to communicate complex needs. In tandem, she moderated and managed online support communities for young adults with cancer.

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Amanda Petersen on Twitter
• MURAL Community
• r/breastcancer
• Planet Cancer
• First Descents
• American Cancer Society
• Young Survival Coalition
• Breast Cancer Research Foundation

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

As community leaders, we're responsible for people. The people in our communities and the people that serve them. In this episode, Chris Catania, head of community at Esri, shares how he approaches planning for growth and specialization for his community organization, for his people, and for his own role.

Chris is currently hiring for three roles, a community operations manager, a community manager for engagement and content, and a community manager for ArcGIS Ideas. Chris shares the responsibilities and scope for each of these roles, in addition to the challenges and advantages of hiring right now. In addition to the effects of the "great resignation," as specialization and scope of responsibility within the community industry grows, so does the need to be clear in our job listings, success metrics, and paths to growth.

Chris and Patrick also discuss:

• The role specializations and career paths that Chris is charting for his team and himself
• Hiring for specializations within community
• Communicating your team's value to other execs (and around the dinner table)

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Esri's community team is two sides of the house (1:49): "[Our community team has] a structure where we have two halves. I've been using the analogy of a house: Two sides of the house. … An operational side, community ops, and on the other side, we have community experience and programs." –@chriscatania

The current landscape for job applicants and hiring managers (4:31): "There's a multi-layer effect that's going on in the job market where you have the Great Resignation going on … [and] then you have this other layer that has emerged over the last five years where you have this proliferation of community jobs." –@chriscatania

All job candidates have areas where they need help (10:20): "Having been in the community industry for a while, [I've been able to] get a good idea of all the different paths that you can take. … [This is] influencing how we are approaching the strategy of the hiring process, and knowing that there's not one person out there that is going to do everything that we [need a given] role to do." –@chriscatania

Planning for your team's growth (24:46): "I started really looking at our new org structure for the community team early last year because I saw the team was growing, … individually and as a team. I saw the community industry starting to advance … people coming into it were really accelerating. I looked at my team, and [said], 'Okay, I need to think about promotions. I need to think about their path.'" –@chriscatania

Planting the seeds to grow and promote your team (25:33): "As I have meetings with my boss about our team and what our team is doing, I plant seeds with them. 'Look what this person's doing.' Because I've seen that work with executives over the years of trying to get buy-in incrementally, just walking in and boom, put down the plan. I like to plant seeds. I like to make a case over time so that when you go for the ask [to grow or promote], it's like, 'Yes, you got it.'" –@chriscatania

Giving out skimpy raises will often lose you money (28:41): "I've worked at places where I'd have to grind out an $8,000 raise to go with a promotion for someone who's been there five years. I was like, 'They need $10,000.' 'You can have $8,000.' That $2,000 in our pocket, it's worth nothing. That $2,000 in their pocket is worth something, because if we lose that person, the amount of time that I'm going to have to spend training, interviewing, we're going to lose way more than that, in my time and in our company's time." –@patrickokeefe

For more than 20 years, Chris Catania has developed a versatile array of skills and experiences in strategic communication, community management, customer experience, global business strategy and emerging media production. He is a dedicated community and collaboration leader, who always thinks "people first, technology next," and uses his passion for emerging community and communication strategies to drive measurable business results and design meaningful experiences for employee and customer audiences. Chris is currently the head of community at Esri.

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Chris' website
• Chris on Twitter
• Esri community
• ArcGIS Ideas
• Chris is hiring a community manager, ArcGIS Ideas, a community manager, engagement and content, and a community operations manager
• Patrick is hiring community moderators on his team at CNN+

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

By now, even if you're not super well-versed in the terminology of Web3, you've probably encountered some of the conversation around its relationship with community. Like with any innovation or change in technology, there can and should be conversations about how Web3 will empower communities. However, we should also ask questions and think about how such change will impact communities, whether they embrace Web3 or not. For example, as Patrick and our guest, staff writer with The New Republic, Jacob Silverman discuss, NFTs may be empowering some artists, but for the DeviantArt community, it's another way that they're seeing their art exploited. And even for NFTs that are becoming ubiquitous, like Bored Apes Yacht Club, how much of the conversation or credit is given back to the artists?

This conversation will give you a great primer on Web3 terminology, but perhaps more importantly, it will equip you with questions and examples to understand the true role of community in the current iteration of Web3.

Jacob and Patrick also discuss:

• The basics of Web3, including cryptocurrency, NFTs, and DAOs
• Reasons why Web3 may not be as egalitarian as it seems
• Why celebrity cryptocurrency clubs of today may not have the same permanence as online fan clubs that already exist

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Misuse of community in Web3 (1:35): "In Web3 … there's a lot of use of this idea of community, but honestly, I find it's often disingenuous when it's coming from say a DAO that controls $300 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency or a crypto startup that has a lot of venture capitalist financing, and it has its own crypto token and an exchange. There's just this appeal to this idea of community within Web3 that, if it were coming from a more traditional corporate setting, would ring very false to people." –@SilvermanJacob

Disguising Web3 under the term "community" may get people to look past the risks (4:24): "[The use of 'community' in Web3] obscures the idea that these are, first and foremost, financial relationships, that there's a lot of risk involved, and that the power relations may not be as egalitarian as the word 'community' implies." –@SilvermanJacob

The supposed Bored Ape Yacht Club community (4:58): "[Bored Ape Yacht Club] is a billion-dollar company that employs several dozen people, is very well connected in Hollywood, whose own financial transactions and behaviors deserve some scrutiny. … If you just call it a community, you're not going to really think about that. You're not going to think about where are the conflicts of interests, who's driving these markets, and what kind of power do I have as a member of the supposed community?" –@SilvermanJacob

What protections will Web3 offer for artists? (11:24): "OpenSea, for example, does not seem to be built to support artists and incentivize the small craftsmen type. Instead, OpenSea is meant to attract as many people as possible to mint NFTs, and it has very few guards against copyright theft." –@SilvermanJacob

The utility of NFTs (45:00): "Maybe the utility of [NFTs] will grow, but right now you're buying into a very hollow idea of community and connection for the promise of future rewards. Whether those rewards will even be worth it is an open question." –@SilvermanJacob

The potential impermanence of NFTs (47:32): "There's going to be some equivalent of link rot with NFTs and with some of these online communities. They're going to break apart. They're not going to be necessarily sustainable or haven't proven themselves sustainable over the long haul, whereas the Dave Matthews Band message board that my college roommate used to post on is probably still around." –@SilvermanJacob

Jacob Silverman is a staff writer with The New Republic. He's the author of Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, and is currently working on a book with Ben McKenzie about crypto and fraud.

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Jacob's website
• The New Republic, where Jacob is a staff writer
• Jacob Silverman on Twitter
• Jacob's tweet that inspired this episode
• Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
• Bored Ape Yacht Club
• DeviantArt Protect
• DeviantArt Protect: 80,000 NFT Alerts Sent
• Here's How DeviantArt Executives Are Tackling Theft and the Future of NFTs, via Gizmodo
• Jacob on CNBC and CNN
• Sam Bankman-Fried
• CZ Binance
• Ross Ulbricht NFT Collection Raises Over $6 Million in Ethereum, Free Ross DAO Wins Auction, via Bitcoin.com
• What exactly is the Jodorowsky's Dune crypto collective trying to make, anyway? via The Verge
• Communities, Associations, and DAOs, written by Marjorie Anderson
• From a Meme to $47 Million: ConstitutionDAO, Crypto, and the Future of Crowdfunding, via The Verge
• Blockchain bridge Wormhole confirms that exploiter stole $320 million worth of crypto assets, via TechCrunch
• Which celebrity has the saddest NFT?, via Slate

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

When was the last time that you trusted your community with the responsibility of collaboration? In this episode of Community Signal, Matt Leacock shares lessons he's learned while designing popular collaborative board games like Pandemic, Pandemic Legacy, and Forbidden Island.

Matt also discusses how he leans on the board game community for his own games. In the pre-launch stages, he has rallied supporters to pre-order his games and prove demand. In the development stages, he's openly shared rules documents, inviting feedback from fans. After a game launches, he also discusses the role that players have when it comes to helping one another as questions and loopholes arise.

Having a shared goal –– winning the game –– is perhaps what motivates players to come together at all stages of the game's development. Knowing that your community members also have a shared purpose or goal, are there ways that you could trust them with collaboration opportunities that could lead to positive outcomes for everyone? That's winning!

Matt and Patrick also discuss:

• Competition within collaborative games
• Establishing norms within games and communities
• The importance of establishing straightforward nomenclature

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

Trust as an integral part of cooperative game design (6:54): "In a cooperative game, you can guide people along. You're all working toward the same goal, so you can help each other out as you go along. I think that does help build trust. Having that common goal really helps. The opposite is true with semi-cooperative ones, or even the ones with the hidden traitor. Most of the game is really about social deduction and trying to guess what people's agendas are." –@mattleacock

Getting buy-in on community norms outside of the context of guidelines infractions (8:45): "To the extent that people can understand what the norms are before they exhibit the behavior, the better. … It's not just, 'Here's the rules. Follow them.' It's, 'Here's the intent of the community [and] where we want to go, so that's why we have these rules.'" –@mattleacock

Board game communities step in when players need help (13:43): "I lean on BoardGameGeek pretty heavily because there's so many rules questions about so many of the games. Some of them are quite simple and very easy to monitor. Especially when the game is released, I want to make sure that no one's found any loophole or has any big questions. I look at those [communities] pretty carefully after release." –@mattleacock

Trusting your community with collaboration (18:52): "We put the rules [for Thunderbirds] up online … in Google Doc format and invited people to edit, which was this leap of faith. People would see the text, and they could make suggestions right in the text. I would obviously monitor this stuff and pull out any abusive language. I was really impressed at how just meeting people with good faith, how far that went, and how much buy-in that created." –@mattleacock

The upsides and potential pitfalls of crowdfunding (20:25): "There are certain advantages of trying to get buy-in [for your board game] from the community, where you're listening to them and understanding what's important. If that's taken too far, then you get perhaps people that feel entitled to tell you exactly what they want and expect it." –@mattleacock

Matt Leacock has been designing board games full-time since 2014. He is best known for his cooperative titles, Pandemic, Pandemic Legacy, and Forbidden Island, and he has designed and developed over two dozen titles for the international market. He is currently working on Daybreak, a game about taking on the climate crisis. His games have won many awards including four nominations for Spiel des Jahres and the Sonderpreis in 2018. In a prior life, he was a user experience designer at Apple, Netscape, AOL, Yahoo, and the chief designer at Sococo.

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Matt Leacock's website
• Jonathan Bailey, formerly on Community Signal (three times)
• Board Game Arena
• BoardGameGeek
• Stats on Kickstarter's categories, including games
• Daybreak Overview in 7 Minutes

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

What metrics and indicators of success are you, your colleagues, and community excited about for 2022? Whether you're hoping to better demonstrate the impact of the community on your business' bottom line, foster safer experiences for your members across the communities they are part of, or want to focus on establishing better boundaries for you and your team, this conversation with Jessica Folsom, lead community manager at ZeniMax Online Studios, may provide some inspiration.

Even without perfect end-to-end campaign attribution, Jessica discusses the impact of being a participant in the Elder Scrolls Online community and how certain attributes may lead to different outcomes for community members and for the overall community. For example, Elder Scrolls Online players may participate in official forums, they may be content creators, they may stream the game, or participate in player-run communities on Discord or Reddit. Jessica and her team have learned that the players that can find their connection to the community retain better and drive investment in the game, too.

With such an expansive group of players, Jessica also has to be prepared to help community members deal with toxic behaviors outside of immediate Elder Scrolls Online spaces. While it can often feel like we can't do much in these circumstances, Jessica explains how she listens, offers guidance on how to block and report the behavior on these parallel platforms, and in some cases, contact local authorities. Do you have a plan for helping your community members handle toxicity on other platforms?

Jessica and Patrick also discuss:

• How Jessica's team sets success metrics
• Helping community managers prevent burnout
• Why community members are not your friends

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

How community connection contributes to retention and growth (8:20): "People who are in guilds, for instance, tend to be much more invested overall in [Elder Scrolls Online]. Not only do they tend to spend more but they also contribute more to the community, which is immensely valuable, to community growth and health. … [Content creators] tend to also be very, very valuable, and not only from a monetary perspective but just what they give to the community. They give us our community culture. They're the backbone of it." –@JessFolsom

How guilds unlock connection to Elder Scrolls Online (9:40): "Guilds [drive] all of the positive things that we want. Players can be in five different guilds. Usually, if they find at least one, they find that community that they really want to be a part of … this is cliché, but it's about the people. If you find a group of people that you're really invested in, you then enjoy the game more, you spend more time, you invest more in the content, [and] you invest more in the monetary side of things as well." –@JessFolsom

Helping community managers prevent burnout (11:24): "It's okay to shut things down at the end of your day. Don't look at the forums, don't look at email. If somebody needs to get a hold of you for an emergency, they will, but take your time to decompress, live your life, enjoy your hobbies, your family, your free time, and you'll come back better to do your job the next day." –@JessFolsom

Helping players deal with toxic behavior in parallel challenges (26:44): "[When our players are getting harassed or being targeted with toxicity in parallel channels], we try to educate players on what they can do and how they can use those tools. How do they block players? How do they use two-factor authentication if their account got hacked? How do they report really awful comments or activity on the various different channels, using the channels' methods of reporting that they have available to them? Then in extreme cases … we will work with that player to educate them on all the different things that they could do by delaying their stream. For instance, if they're getting stream sniped, [everything from] putting a delay on their stream to contacting local authorities." –@JessFolsom

Why there is no official Elder Scrolls Online Discord (26:44): "I know a lot of smaller studios really like Discord but with a community our size, the amount of moderation that we would need, we've got a player base of, I think we recently said 12 million or something like that, it's not realistic to have a Discord community that we run. If we run a community, and it's an official community, there is an expectation that we are able to maintain a certain level of protection, professionalism, and rules that I don't think we can." –@JessFolsom

Jessica Folsom has been working with gaming communities for 16 years and is currently the lead community manager at ZeniMax Online Studios. She has been working with the Elder Scrolls Online community for about nine and a half years. Jessica got her start in the video games industry in 1999 as a customer support representative at Nintendo of America in Washington state, where she is originally from. After about eight years there, she left and spent time at numerous studios, including NCSOFT, Trion, Mythic, EA BioWare, Big Huge Games, and 38 Studios.

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Jessica Folsom on Twitter
• Jessica Folsom on LinkedIn
• ZeniMax Online Studios
• The Elder Scrolls Online community

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Do you have a 60-second pitch for your community? In this episode of Community Signal, Colleen Young, community director for Mayo Clinic, raises the challenge of being able to deliver a concise and impactful pitch to other leaders at the nonprofit. "I'm just imagining finding myself in the elevator with this leader by happenstance and being able to finally say something just in two floors that we have. It's really hard to be able to know what is going to motivate them to be excited about the community. I'm really struggling with that," explains Young. Many, if not all of us, have been in a situation like this, whether we were helping to onboard a new leader or in an impromptu meeting.

This conversation is a bit longer than 60 seconds, but in it, Colleen delivers a very compelling case for Mayo Clinic Connect. The community's moderation practices and active participation makes it less of a haven for misinformation. And when misinformation does appear, expert testimonials and active participants within the community help inform and correct. The community also comes together to help people understand their options for care and to manage their symptoms. "Peer support can better health outcomes," says Young. The community also has a direct impact on Mayo Clinic's livelihood – as it can be a direct driver of appointment bookings and visits.

So, the next time you're thinking about how to pitch your community to another colleague, think about the value that it brings to your members and how that value leads to positive outcomes for the business. And as Patrick says, don't be afraid to ask for more time to advocate for the community and your work!

Colleen and Patrick also discuss:

• Why Mayo Clinic Connect measures appointments as a metric
• Has medical misinformation actually gotten worse over the last 15 years?
• Developing your 60-second community pitch

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform.

How Mayo Clinic Connect approaches misinformation (3:07): "There's a lot of misinformation that's not with malintent. That's the part [where] I think online communities can do a lot of good, in that sometimes it's just misunderstandings, and the self-correcting nature of online communities in health is really quite amazing if you have a healthy, active community." –@colleen_young

Patient connection can improve health outcomes (14:14): "On the patient portal, patients are reporting how they're managing the side effects of cancer treatment. If they're severe, they get triaged to a nurse. If they're moderate-to-mild, they get triaged, as a prescription, to the community because they know through community support that they can help manage those side effects. That is the clinicians really giving a hat tip to the community, knowing that peer support can better health outcomes." –@colleen_young

On launching a community strictly for research (16:28): "[There have been] researchers really interested in peer support online, so they would create a community in order to study the community. … It was terribly frightening, I have to tell you. They were creating these communities, bringing people together somehow … [and] when the grant was over, pulling the plug. They had managed to connect some people and essentially left them high and dry." –@colleen_young

Colleen Young is an online community strategist, recognized for her expertise in building online health communities. Clients include Mayo Clinic, College of Family Physicians Canada, Canadian Virtual Hospice, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, Hjernerystelsesforeningen Denmark, EURODIS, and more. As community director for Mayo Clinic Connect, a virtual community connecting patients with each other and to Mayo Clinic medical expertise, Colleen believes online connectivity is arguably the most exciting innovation of the patient-led health era. As a tenacious connector of patients, Colleen demonstrates how an active community, strategically managed, can re-imagine health care and improve health outcomes.

• Sponsor: Hivebrite, the community engagement platform
• Colleen Young on LinkedIn
• Mayo Clinic
• Mayo Clinic News Network
• Mayo Clinic Connect
• Medicine 2.0
• Priscilla McClay on Community Signal
• Sue Ryder Online Bereavement Support

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Are you able to step away from your community for days at a time? When you return, are your team and the community still running smoothly? If you answered yes to these questions, then congratulations! Whether it's documentation, systems, or setting proper expectations with your boss and colleagues, those boundaries and structure are crucial, not just for yourself, but for the people around you and the community itself.

Our guest, Allison Able, senior manager of community at Sisense, explains that creating and upholding these boundaries is a constant work in progress. "There's great power in … being able to step away and have things go okay. That speaks well for you if that's the community you build, that it doesn't need you to exist," explains Patrick.

Having a supportive team goes a long way in setting work-life boundaries, so fittingly, Allison explains what her approach will be to building the community team at Sisense and why their community is currently in beta.

Allison and Patrick also discuss:

• Adding the community content manager role to the community team
• How to embody healthy boundaries for you and your team
• The right order of community programs for Sisense
• Community Signal's sixth anniversary –– thank you listeners, supporters, and guests!

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community.

Don't blame the tools (7:52): "Email is only bad if you send bad emails. Notifications are only bad if you send bad notifications." –@patrickokeefe

Do your community's emails and notifications have intention and value? (15:09): "Community is a give-and-take relationship in a lot of ways. If I am going to reach out to you [via email], I want to … provide an asset that's going to enhance your professional life and make your job or your product experience easier." –@_aable_

Having a dog has helped Allison identify better work boundaries (24:45): "I'm one of those people that adopted a dog in COVID and having a pup who I love and adore, [and] doesn't go according to your schedule, it has been a great learning experience for me to really shut that computer or walk away [to] spend time with that dog. He has to walk, he has to eat. He has to do all of these things. That's been helpful [in achieving a healthy work-life balance]." –@_aable_

Setting and embodying healthy work-life boundaries (27:45): "I know there's an email in my inbox I could probably respond to, but then the next day happens, and did the world end? No, and the community's still going and thriving. That's something that I've found comfort in." –@_aable_

A former teacher turned community manager, Allison Able can trace her community-building ways back to high school, where she was the leader of multiple clubs. When she moved into education, it was shocking to her that teachers did not network. In response, Allison recruited a committee of teachers and developed a partnership with a local teaching college to launch the Teacher Leadership Network. TLN is still in existence today and has gathered thousands of local educators at all levels for networking events, webinars, conferences, and more.

When it came time to start a new career chapter, by a stroke of luck, she came across a job posting for a community manager role at Higher Logic, where she successfully built and launched over 25 communities for a variety of association and corporate customers, developed full-scale engagement programs and successfully revitalized several dormant communities. Additionally, she led a team of community managers to scale and grow one of the largest global enterprise communities. Today, she is the senior manager of community at Sisense, where she recently launched Sisense Community beta.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Allison Able on Twitter
• Sisense
• Sisense Community beta
• Alex Witkowski on Community Signal
• Higher Logic
• Heather McNair

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Earlier this month, blogging pioneer Jason Kottke tweeted that "social media would be a better place to connect with people if the folks building and using these services had spent formative time on and taken inspiration from Flickr and MetaFilter instead of 4chan and Reddit. Gardening vs. waste management."

That tweet spoke to Patrick who retweeted it, and that retweet elicited a reply from Lydia Fiedler, community manager for Splitcoaststampers, leading to this episode of the podcast.

What do your community members want out of their community? Are you tending a garden that is actively growing toward those goals? Or are you tolerating noise and managing waste that gets in the way? Having a clear sense of what brings the community together helps Lydia Fiedler keep conversations on track, set expectations for community members, and come up with inspiring challenges.

If you're planning programming for the coming year or just in a creative rut with your own work, this conversation with Patrick and Lydia offers some great inspiration that can help you create great experiences that will bring your members together and enable them reach their own goals.

Lydia and Patrick also discuss:

• Operating in the "gray areas" of community management
• Features that people clamor for on social media platforms that hosted online communities offer routinely
• How challenges align with the Splitcoaststampers community's goal of becoming better artists and crafters

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community.

Being comfortable with making judgement calls for your community (5:15): "If you have a community that you're taking care of, and there's something that maybe doesn't exactly violate the letter of one of your guidelines, you have to be able to make the judgment call that you still don't want it in your community. Then you have to be able to communicate that, 'I'm a human being, and I make judgment calls. I do it to preserve the culture of this community.'" –@understandblue

Fostering Splitcoaststampers' spirit of creativity (9:28): "The most important thing that you have is the definition of what you want out of your community. That's your little seed that you're going to protect. I'm in a creative industry, and so the cultural little seed that I have to protect with everything in my online communities is people's ability to feel creative." –@understandblue

Cultivating a community of gardeners (13:05): "When you have a really good, strong community culture, … the people that love what you're building, they help you take out the trash. They don't want it there anymore than you do, and you know you have a good thing going when you have people helping you with the trash." –@understandblue

Lydia Fiedler is the community manager of Splitcoaststampers, where she has been for 11 years. Lydia has been creating art for nearly 40 years and creating online content for about 20. Crafting spaces that feel friendly and welcoming is her mission, whether at work teaching online, or engaging in social media. She also spent 20 years in the construction industry as an HR director and marketing director, and has worked in software development and at great startups in the Austin, Texas area, but the art industry has been her home for more than a decade. Lydia lives in Austin with her husband and two feline overlords, Maddie and Splotchy.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Carol Benovic-Bradley, Community Signal's editorial lead, who has been working on the show for four years now! (added by Patrick)
• Understand Blue, Lydia's website
• Splitcoaststampers
• Twitter Blue
• Jason Kottke's tweet about "gardening vs. waste management"
• Derek Powazek on Community Signal
• Heather Champ on Community Signal
• Matthew Haughey on Community Signal
• Splitcoaststampers gallery
• Falliday Fest Challenge Forum
• Lydia on YouTube
• Lydia on Instagram

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

If you threw a random group of people together, united primarily by a shared educational goal that they can accomplish with or without the group, and had two weeks to build a sense of community among them, what would you do?

That's what Alex Witkowski spends time thinking about. He's the community lead for Section4, which offers business courses they call sprints. These sprints are typically around two weeks long and then the experience is over – if you want it to be. If you don't want it to be, you can continue to benefit from and collaborate with the students that took the same course.

Alex oversees a team of four community managers that guides this growing number or cohorts and hopes to bring then together through an upcoming alumni membership program. He also believes that cohort-based communities often exploit community rather than build it. We chat about that, plus:

• Alex's transition from English teacher to community pro and the condescension he felt when making the move
• How he determines when a community manager simply has too many cohorts
• Why Slack may not be the right tool for their alumni product

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community.

Checking your assumptions when interviewing job candidates (05:02): "I'm doing a lot of interviewing, I'm doing a lot of hiring, and I'm trying to be hyper cognizant of everything in an interview process [that] is an assumption. … I've been trying to be really aware of making assumptions and holding people back from opportunities, just because I'm assuming they won't be able to make [a specific] change." –@HeyLifeboat

The Section4 community helps students apply course knowledge in the real world (10:55): "I'm really hoping to build the continuing community around this idea of application. We all have this shared language, we all have these concepts, and I often think about it as the marriage of: We can offer the book smarts, the community is where the street smarts comes in. … We can't give you every answer for what this looks like in a B2B SaaS context in our two-week course, but we can connect you to people who can engage in discussion with how they're thinking about applying it to a B2B SaaS context." –@HeyLifeboat

Section4's community managers focus on bringing humanness to the community (17:11): "I've taken other online courses before, [and] I couldn't name one person at the company. I've never interacted with anyone. I didn't feel a connection to them. I felt the connection to the course, but [at Section4], I feel like there's a connection to our ethos, which has been really exciting." –@HeyLifeboat

Section4's community managers focus on bringing humanness to the community (31:14): "Oftentimes the self-promoters are some of the loudest, nastiest people that you have in professional groups. They are the ones who respond most offensively when challenged on it. They will attack the community manager, or they will say, 'Of course, I'm not doing that. This is relevant! You're going to kill the community! The community's never been the same since Patrick took over!' This is all stuff that you have to hear and deal with. Those are some of the worst folks in professional circles, but yet, if you let them do it because it's easier in the moment to not take their abuse, it is its own insidious thing that infects the space." –@patrickokeefe

What does community-based learning actually mean? (54:57): "As someone who taught for six years, there's an art to education, and throwing out a bunch of articles or a handful of videos and then dumping people in the space together and hoping that something happens, that's not education. I think that's where the word 'community,' to me, feels exploitative. Just because there are other people here doesn't mean it's a community." –@HeyLifeboat

Alex Witkowski is a former high school English teacher who left the profession when he found out that he could take the best part of his job – nurturing community – and do it full time. Since leaving teaching, he has worked in the non-profit and educational technology space, helping a variety of communities including global volunteers, college students, college professors, and business professionals make valuable connections and memories. He is currently the community lead at Section4, which aims to make MBA-quality education more affordable and accessible through interactive, community-based courses led by the world's top business professors. In his spare time, he watches countless independent movies, makes themed mixtapes, and walks everywhere.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Alex on Twitter
• Section4, the business education provider where Alex is community lead
• Prof. Scott Galloway, the founder of Section4
• Patrick's new job: Community lead at CNN+
• Bassey Etim's previous appearances on Community Signal: #4, #123, #145, and #160

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

If you work in content moderation or with a team that specializes in content moderation, then you know that the fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a challenging one. The New York Times reported that in 2018, technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of child sexual abuse. Ralph Spencer, our guest for this episode, has been working to make online spaces safer and combatting CSAM for more than 20 years, including as a technical investigator at AOL.

Ralph describes how when he first started at AOL, in the mid-'90s, the work of finding and reviewing CSAM was largely manual. His team depended on community reports and all of the content was manually reviewed. Eventually, this manual review led to the creation of AOL's Image Detection Filtering Process (IDFP), which reduced the need to manually review the actual content of CSAM. Working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), law enforcement, and a coalition of other companies, Ralph shares how he saw his own team's work evolve, what he considered his own metrics of success when it comes to this work, and the challenges that he sees for today's platforms.

The tools, vocabulary, and affordances for professionals working to make the internet safer have all improved greatly, but in this episode, Patrick and Ralph discuss the areas that need continued improvement. They discuss Section 230 and what considerations should be made if it were to be amended. Ralph explains that when he worked at AOL, the service surpassed six million users. As of last year, Facebook had 2.8 billion monthly active users. With a user base that large and a monopoly on how many people communicate, what will the future hold for how children, workers, and others that use them are kept safe on such platforms?

Ralph and Patrick also discuss:

• Ralph's history fighting CSAM at AOL, both manually and with detection tools
• Apple's announcement to scan iCloud photos for NCMEC database matches
• How Ralph and other professionals dealing with CSAM protect their own health and well-being
• Why Facebook is calling for new or revised internet laws to govern its own platform

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community.

How Ralph fell into trust and safety work (20:23): "[Living in the same apartment building as a little girl who was abused] was a motivational factor [in doing trust and safety work]. I felt it was a situation where, while I did basically all I could in that situation, I [also] didn't do enough. When this [job] came along … I saw it as an opportunity. If I couldn't make the situation that I was dealing with in real life correct, then maybe I can do something to make a situation for one of these kids in these [CSAM] pictures a little bit better." –Ralph Spencer

Coping with having to routinely view CSAM (21:07): "I developed a way of dealing with [having to view CSAM]. I'd leave work and try not to think about it. When we were still doing this as a team … everybody at AOL generally got 45 minutes to an hour for lunch. We'd take two-hour lunches, go out, walk around. We did team days before people really started doing them. We went downtown in DC one day and went to the art gallery. The logic for that was like, you see ugly stuff every day, let's go look at some stuff that has cultural value or has some beauty to it, and we'll stop and have lunch at a nice restaurant." –Ralph Spencer

How organizations work with NCMEC and law enforcement to report CSAM (28:32): "[When our filtering tech] catches something that it sees in the [CSAM] database, it packages a report which includes the image, the email that the image was attached to, and a very small amount of identifying information. The report is then automatically sent to [the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children]. NCMEC looks at it, decides if it's something that they can run with, and if it is … they send the report to law enforcement in [the correct] jurisdiction." –Ralph Spencer

When "Ralph caught a fed" (37:37): "We caught the guy who was running the Miami office of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. He was sending [CSAM]. … That one set me back a little bit. … I remember asking the guy who started the team that I was on, who went on to become an expert witness. He worked in the legal department, and his job basically was to go around the country and testify at all the trials explaining how the technology that caught these images worked. I said, 'I got an email about this guy from ICE down in Florida, was that us?' He's like, 'Yes, that was you.'" –Ralph Spencer

Facebook's multiple lines of communication offer multiple avenues for content violations (45:08): "Zuckerberg is running around talking about how he's trying to get the world closer together by communicating and increasing the lines of communication. A lot of these lines just lead to destructive ends." –Ralph Spencer

Ralph Spencer has been working to make online spaces safer for more than 20 years, starting with his time as a club editorial specialist (message board editor) at Prodigy and then graduating to America Online. He's wrestled with some of the most challenging material on the internet.

During his time at AOL, Ralph was a terms of service representative, a graphic analyst, and a case investigator before landing his final position as a technical investigator. In that position, he was in charge of dealing with all issues involving child sexual abuse material (CSAM), then referred to as "illegal images" by the company. Ralph oversaw the daily operation of the automated processes used to scan AOL member email for these images and the reporting of these incidents to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) which, ultimately, sent these reports to the appropriate law enforcement agencies.

The evidence that Ralph, and the team he worked with in AOL's legal department, compiled contributed to numerous arrests and convictions of individuals for the possession and distribution of CSAM. He currently lives in the Washington, DC area and works as a freelance trust and safety consultant.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Ralph Spencer on LinkedIn
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)
• Andrew Vachss
• Apple's extended protections for children
• Derek Powazek on Community Signal
• Derek's thread regarding Apple's announcement
• The Internet Is Overrun With Images of Child Sexual Abuse. What Went Wrong? (the New York Times)
• The Facebook Files (the Wall Street Journal)
• Jeff Horwitz on Community Signal
• Sophie Zhang on Community Signal
• The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It (the Wall Street Journal)
• Facebook's Zuckerberg defends encryption, despite child safety concerns (Reuters)
• aol.com by Kara Swisher

• View transcript on our website

If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.