Community Signal

In this episode of Community Signal, Patrick talks to four past guests of the show, Paula Rosenberg, Tim Courtney, Scott Moore, and Daniel Marotta, who are all looking for new full-time career opportunities. We're hoping that by tapping into the collective power of our listeners, we can help them find their next big thing.

We've never done this before, and here's how you can help: First, we hope that you'll take the time to hear their stories and the work that they're proud to have been part of.

After doing so, if you know someone who has an opportunity that matches with their expertise, please connect with them through LinkedIn or reach out to us, and we'll gladly make a connection. More than just links to job postings or job boards, we are trying to make direct, helpful connections to people who are hiring where one of these pros would be a great fit.

And even if you don't know someone who is hiring, if you're willing, we'd love for you to spread the word about this episode.

With each guest, Patrick dives into the following three questions. Have you reflected on these points recently?

• How would you summarize your experience?
• What's an accomplishment from your career that you're really proud of?
• What type of job are you looking for, including title, level, department, industry? Where do you think you'll be happiest?

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

On working across customer success, customer marketing, and community management (3:20): "[Working on different teams that touch community and] trying these different areas out [has allowed me to] see where my passions and my niche really are. … No matter what role [you have], you go on to understand each of those worlds and how those roles work because you're going to need to collaborate with those different teams no matter what your lane is." –@NYC_Paula

Creating experiences that reward users of all skill levels (11:25): "For every user, whether they succeed or not, we built a program [through LEGO IDEAS] that systematically treated everyone with respect and dignity, and also taught the organization how to systematically handle consumer feedback and consumer input, [in a way] that's coming from a real place of passion." –@timcourtney

Community management is above all else, about putting people first (18:23) "Of all the lessons I've learned, everything that I do, whether it's community guidelines, whether it's social design and technology, or whether it's actually sitting down and talking with community members, it's always about putting that group of people first." –@scottmoore

Using data to explain the business impact of community (32:05): "We found out that people in the [Penn Foster online] community are vested, and they want to do well. They were taking more exams. They weren't defaulting on their tuition. They were actually paying more month-to-month on their tuition. We're finding value for the customer, but we're also solving a business goal, and that's top line revenue." –@MassMarotta

Paula Rosenberg has worked in community management, customer success, community events, and customer marketing. Her former employers include Vimeo, VHX, Quirky, and POGO Events. She's also been a contributor to the WeSupport newsletter since 2016.

Tim Courtney is a customer experience, crowdsourcing, and community leader who built the LEGO IDEAS crowdsourcing platform from pilot to over 1 million users.

Scott Moore has over 25 years of experience helping organizations large and small build solid and successful, connected communities. This includes Digital Promise Global, Answers.com, Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, Communities.com, and Fujitsu.

Daniel Marotta is a community management veteran with over 12 years of experience. You can most often find him fine-tuning content and engagement strategies to continuously improve the customer experience. He previously worked at Penn Foster.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Paula Rosenberg on LinkedIn
• Paula Rosenberg's portfolio of published works
• Paula Rosenberg on Community Signal: How to Transition a Community Team After You Acquire Their Company
• Tim Courtney on LinkedIn
• The LEGO IDEAS community
• Tim Courtney on Community Signal: LEGO IDEAS and the Building Blocks of a Successful Crowdsourcing Community
• Scott Moore on LinkedIn
• Scott Moore on Twitter
• Scott Moore on Community Signal: Threats to Section 230 Threaten the Very Existence of Our Communities, Threats to Section 230 Should Unleash the Political Power of Community Professionals, Facebook Doesn't Protect Black Children, But They Did Add "Community" to Their Mission Statement, So…, Ending the Millennial Conversation, Customer Experience Insurance and Other Short Stories, Retaining Talented Community Pros and What Makes a Great Boss? (3 Years of Community Signal), and Learning from Theme Park Design
• Daniel Marotta on LinkedIn
• Daniel Marotta on Community Signal: Students Who Use the Community Pass More Exams – and Pay More Tuition

• 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 classrooms have gone virtual and people are spending more time online, Duolingo has seen an influx of students and educators on their platform. Luckily, Duolingo has a structured ambassador program to help those new users find their way and achieve their language learning and teaching goals.

Kevin Reaves, a community support specialist at Duolingo, talks extensively about who these ambassadors are, what motivates them, and how they exhibit ownership in areas from forum moderation to event management, course creation, and more. Their program has thousands of volunteer ambassadors and with that, quality assurance protocols to ensure that everyone is advancing Duolingo's mission of bringing free language education to the world.

Patrick and Kevin discuss:

• The structure of Duolingo's ambassador program
• How Duolingo empowers and rewards superusers
• Ensuring quality in community-authored courses
• Their "dream" community features and tools

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

Rewarding power users with insider features (7:48): "Some people have 900+ day streaks, 2,000 day streaks [on Duolingo]. Those people are amazing. They really put forth the effort to learn. We try to reward that as much as we can [with special extras]." –@Ksquall1

Language learning brings families closer (11:43): "We have warm stories [from the Duolingp community]. 'I can now communicate with my grandma using her native language.' … It really goes to show a lot of what language learning as a whole can do for people." –@Ksquall1

Course health as an indicator for community health (25:47): "[We want] at least 90% of our courses [to be] active at any given time. If we notice that a course is inactive… we check in with the team and say, 'Are there any blockers? … Is there something that we can do to help in the building of this course?'" –@Ksquall1

Taking care of yourself as a volunteer or community professional (44:15): "The impact of seeing [self-harm and] abuse, it can wear on the body a bit. It can wear on you emotionally, and that's why it's important to take that break, get yourself a drink of water, walk around a bit … lean on each other and give each other advice, because [that] goes a long way." –@Ksquall1

Kevin Reaves has been working in community management for 7 years and, since late 2017, he's been a contractor at Duolingo as a community support specialist. Previously, he spent time at Space Ape Games, Enthusiast Gaming, and The Huffington Post.

• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Kevin Reaves on LinkedIn
• Duolingo
• Duolingo's Global Ambassador program
• Trump will lose special Twitter protections in January (via Reuters)
• Duolingo Incubator
• How Community Software Can Use Forensic Science to Identify Bad Members
• Censor Block and the Most Efficient Use of Your Forums' Word Censor Feature
• Sarah Hawk, VP of Community at Discourse on Community Signal
• Paul Bradley, manager of strategic services at Higher Logic, on Community Signal

• 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.

At this point, we likely all know someone that has lost their job or had to make budget cuts because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There's a narrative in the community industry that we must always be communicating the value we bring to the organizations we work for, but it's also worth saying that community has really showed up to fight back against this pandemic. The work of connecting and creating safe spaces for people (think tenant unions, social justice organizations, voter registration and education efforts, community fridges, I could go on!) is more vital than ever.

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 53% of Americans say the internet has been an essential tool during the pandemic (with 34% more labeling it important). That means the work of community professionals in creating spaces where people can find value, joy, factual information, and human connection on the internet is so important. So if you're looking for a job, let us know. And if you're faced with making budget cuts for your team, reflect on crises you've managed and customers you've delighted, look to how you've grown and developed your team, review the data that points to your efforts, and breathe. You've got this.

As our guest Paul Bradley (manager of strategic services at Higher Logic) says during this episode, "if anything, community is what you need to lean into during times of crisis." Let's all remember the community of community professionals that we have to lean on during these times –– whether those are others on your team or your friends here on Community Signal.

Here's a preview of what Patrick and Paul discuss in this episode:

• Countering budget-cutting arguments
• Some buy-low investments to consider for your community
• Being accountable for the professional development of your team
• Why Paul deleted his Twitter account with over 100k followers when he took his first community job
• And Karn, our producer, celebrates five years on the Community Signal team!

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

Bad moments are our time to shine (6:28): "If something bad is going on [at your company], it's an opportunity for a community manager because they can then insert a human element into that situation and provide empathetic value that people really respond to." –@PaulBradleyCMGR

This is not the time to divest from community (6:40): "If you are in a situation where you're like, 'I'm going to back out of my community,' I would say, 'Why? You made this decision [to invest in community]. What were you thinking when you made the decision? How can that possibly have changed just because there's a crisis going on?' If anything, community is what you need to lean into during times of crisis." –@PaulBradleyCMGR

Sending more marketing or engagement emails can have a cost (16:58): "I've worked at places [where my bosses said], 'Just send another email, we need two more people, hit them again!,' and they don't understand the law of diminishing returns. Yes, maybe we'll get one more at the cost of 17 unsubscribes." –@patrickokeefe

A diverse team creates a fuller understanding of problems (19:07): "One of the fun things about [having] a team of people who have different skills, is that I don't know what my problem fully is until [one of my team members] looks at it and says this is your problem, and this is how we need to solve it." –@PaulBradleyCMGR

Managers, make an effort to keep your one-on-one meetings (27:10): "You don't miss a one-on-one [meeting with your direct reports]. One of the things that made me feel the worst, when I had one-on-ones, was when my boss canceled. That means something to people." –@PaulBradleyCMGR

Helping your direct reports advance in their careers (29:56): "When I was hiring people, I would say, 'Here's the deal. Two years from now, if you are into this role and you do the work, I'm going to work to promote you here or you're going to take my job or, if you're ready to move on and we don't have a spot, I will support you. I will be your advocate in helping you to find a new role. I will be a reference. I'll help you however I can.'" –@patrickokeefe

Paul Bradley is the manager of strategic services at Higher Logic following community manager roles at MicroStrategy, ADP, and Intel.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Paul Bradley on Twitter
• Paul Bradley on LinkedIn
• Higher Logic
• Congrats on five years with Community Signal, Karn!
• Shannon Emery, who connected Patrick and Paul
• Paul's tweet about how he deleted his Twitter accounts after taking his first community job.
• WeSupport newsletter
• Higher Logic Users Group

• 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.

Section 230 is a vitally important law for online community builders in the U.S. That's why we've consistently talked about it on Community Signal, and the growing threat to its existence.

The volume of legislation being proposed, that would amend Section 230, is increasingly rapidly with 6 bills proposed in September and October alone. These bills will impact online communities small and large – not just Big Tech.

Whenever new Section 230 altering legislation is proposed, Jess Miers analyzes it. Jess works as a legal policy specialist at Google, while finishing up a law degree, and she joins the show to talk about what's on the horizon.

Jess and Patrick discuss:

• Why are legislators so focused on Section 230 right now?
• Trends from the bills that are on the table
• Regulators efforts to stop communities from moderating things that aren't illegal

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

Why are there so many Section 230 bills right now? (4:15): "If I have to be really cynical about this, we're in an election cycle. Doing something about Section 230 looks good for regulators that are trying to get reelected. It seems like everybody has fallen out of love with the internet, both on the regulatory and user side. Section 230 is just one of those things that's easy to come up with a proposal for and generate a lot of excitement around." –@jess_miers

More honesty from Big Tech could lead to more understanding from legislators (22:09): "If Big Tech was a little bit more forthcoming about [the moderation] challenges they face, maybe we wouldn't have such a blind spot in the regulatory process when they're coming up with content moderation restrictive bills." –@jess_miers

Are you sure you can't increase your moderation, trust, and safety budget? (22:27): "There is an issue [when] a company has problems around content moderation and they talk about how they've reached a certain limit or they couldn't hire anyone else and yet, they report record revenue. That's a problem because sometimes you're placing artificial restrictions on yourself with staffing because you made this much money and you decided you didn't want to spend it." –@patrickokeefe

Should Section 230 be amended? (34:10): "Amending Section 230 isn't going to fix any of the issues that we have with the internet. It's just going to make it harder for us to fix those issues in the long run." –@jess_miers

Jess Miers is a third-year law student at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she studies internet law and policy. During law school, Jess was a legal intern for Twitter and TechFreedom, a technology policy think-tank based in Washington, D.C.

Currently, Jess is a research associate for the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy, where she speaks and writes about intermediary liability law. Her scholarship primarily covers Section 230 and content moderation. As of recent, Jess is also a full-time policy specialist at Google.

• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Anette Beebe on Community Signal's episode about Trump's Executive Order
• Jess Miers' website
• Google, where Jess is a legal policy specialist
• UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, where Jess is a research associate
• Text of Don't Push My Buttons Act (see Jess' redline documenting proposed Section 230 changes)
• Text of House version of EARN It Act (Jess' redline)
• Text of See Something, Say Something Act (Jess' redline)
• Text of Protect Speech Act (Jess' redline)
• Text of Online Content Policy Modernization Act (Jess' redline)
• Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA)/Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)
• Text of Section 230
• Zeran v. America Online Inc.
• Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC
• Text of Stopping Big Tech's Censorship Act (Jess' redline)
• Text of Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act (Jess' redline)
• Facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on job, about Serena Scola, at al. v. Facebook, Inc. case (via The Verge)
• Fair Labor Standards Act
• Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
• Jess Miers' Medium blog
• Jess Miers' Section 230 talk at TEDxSantaClaraUniversity

• 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.

"Let the people see what I have seen."

This is what Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, said when she insisted on an open casket funeral for her brutally murdered son in 1955. Photos of Emmett's disfigured body circulated and encouraged many to join the civil rights movement.

Darnella Frazier is the teenager that caught George Floyd's murder on camera and posted it to Facebook. She later stated "that could've been one of your loved ones, and you would want to see the truth as well." As the video circulated, it inspired protests across the country, and George Floyd's name, image, and story, became a rallying cry against police brutality and systemic racism.

Our guest this week, Prof. Omar Wasow, breaks down the thread between the power of these images even further: "What some of these videos do, what some of these images do, is they allow people who are outside to have a window in, to have a moment of empathy, to walk a few steps in the feet of somebody who might have suffered in some profound way."

These images clearly have the power to create understanding and power movements. These victims of brutal and heartless crimes become our symbols for change, though we must not forget that they were people, that they were just trying to exist. For example, the protests that erupted after George Floyd's murder have been twisted into a completely unrelated conspiracy theory by QAnon.

Wasow, the founder of BlackPlanet and a professor whose research focuses on race, politics, and statistical methods, discusses how the internet gives a platform to those who might otherwise not have one, like Darnella Frazier, but also serves as fertile ground for dangerous groups like QAnon.

Patrick and Omar also discuss:

• The principles that made BlackPlanet a popular community for Black people of all generations and backgrounds
• How BlackPlanet and other early social platforms inspired creativity amongst their users
• The power and importance of documenting and sharing injustice

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

Wasow optimized BlackPlanet for the creativity of the community (5:38): "[The] transformation from player to programmer was really powerful and changed the arc of my life. When we were designing BlackPlanet, that was something we really wanted to offer our users as well: The experience of going from being people who are just consumers of the web, to being creators and really having it be at core, a site where your creativity could flourish." –@owasow

BlackPlanet brought the Black communities online (12:53): "[There were] all of these institutions that involved the Black community having deep ties to each other, [sororities, historically Black colleges and universities, Black churches], that didn't have a home on the internet and that was something [BlackPlanet] could provide. … It's partly about making a site that was accessible, that was easy to use, that gave people lots of ways to express themselves. It also was a site that could be used in different ways by different people." –@owasow

What communities and dance floors have in common (31:22): "There's a seeding function, which is getting people into the community and getting a critical mass. I used to think of it as a dance floor. You're running a social site; if it's an empty dance floor, that's not a place that's going to thrive, but if you can get a packed dance floor, that's awesome." –@owasow

Will social media platforms give users tools to craft their own experiences? (31:57): "If you give people more tools to manage the experience, you can take off some of the responsibility of being the moderator." –@owasow

How videos like the one showing the murder of George Floyd can ignite a movement and lead to social change (35:00): "If we have these siloed identities, it can mean that we don't actually have a lot of understanding of people who live in different worlds. What some of these videos do, what some of these images do, is they allow people who are outside to have a window in, to have a moment of empathy, to walk a few steps in the feet of somebody who might have suffered in some profound way." –@owasow

Why documentation of protests and injustice is important (35:25): "If I'm a protester, if I'm an activist, [I think] like a camera. What is the moment that will be documented, that could be shared more widely, that allows people outside of this particular moment to have some sense of the larger injustice we're trying to draw attention to?" –@owasow

How the internet provides fertile ground for dangerous groups like QAnon (44:49): "[The] capacity for outsiders to gain voice and win is a really valuable part of the internet. At the same time, what we've seen both in politics and media is that the absence of gatekeepers has this real downside." –@owasow

Omar Wasow is an assistant professor in Princeton's department of politics. His research focuses on race, politics, and statistical methods. His paper on the political consequences of the 1960s civil rights movement was published in the American Political Science Review. His co-authored work on estimating causal effects of race was published in the Annual Review of Political Science. Before joining the Academy, Professor Wasow served as a regular on-air technology analyst and was the co-founder of BlackPlanet, a social network he helped grow to over three million active users.

In 2003, he helped found a high performing K-8 charter school in Brooklyn. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship in the Aspen Institute's Henry Crowne fellowship. He received a PhD in African American Studies, a master's in government, and a master's in statistics from Harvard University.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Omar Wasow's website
• Omar Wasow on Twitter
• Omar Wasow's paper on the political consequences of the 1960s civil rights movement
• BlackPlanet
• An Ode to BlackPlanet
• BlackPlanet's Founder Talks Myspace, Why He was Skeptical of Twitter, And If Facebook May Have Peaked (via Complex)
• Community Signal's editorial lead, Carol Benovic-Bradley
• Gail Ann Williams, founder of The Well, on Community Signal
• Stacy Horn, founder of Echo, on Community Signal
• Jenna Woodul on Community Signal
• Bruce Ableson, founder of OpenDiary, on Community Signal
• Compute! Magazine
• theGlobe
• Ethel's Club
• Where are the Black designers?
• Techqueria
• Barack Obama jokes about his finsta account
• Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting
• Darnella Frazier, the young lady that documented George Floyd's murder
• Slacktivism
• The story of Emmett Till and the Freedom Summer murders
• George Floyd protests: Misleading footage and conspiracy theories spread online (via BBC)
• How conspiracy theorists have latched on to the US protests as evidence of the 'Great Awakening' (via SBSNews)
• Kansas City protest is billed as a Save Our Children event, but will QAnon show up? (via The Kansas City Star)
• How Democracies Die

• 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 you contribute to open source projects, Dawn Foster makes it abundantly clear that even if "you're there on behalf of [a] company, you need to do the right things for the community." In this episode of Community Signal, Dawn outlines the principles that she follows and shepherds as the director of open source community strategy at VMware's Open Source Program Office.

These principles foster projects and communities that are collaborative and encouraging, but of course, it does not always pan out that way. Dawn discusses how documentation and education, having a clear commitment from the company managing the open source project, and balancing for collaboration instead of number of contributions can all help to build healthy open source communities.

Unlike social platforms that optimize for getting everyone to contribute an infinite amount, open source projects rely on spreading knowledge and contributions amongst the group. "In some cases we have open source projects [where] almost all of the contributions are made by a single individual. What happens if that individual wins the lottery and leaves VMware, and doesn't want to work on this project anymore?" That's a great question for all of us that manage communities. If our top contributors left tomorrow, who would pull the community forward?

Patrick and Dawn also discuss:

• Evaluating open source community health
• The tools and documentation that help with governance
• Evaluating the risk of contributing to an open source project

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

Good documentation begets good contribution practices (7:00): "Even though I've been contributing to open source projects for years, every time I pop up in a new community, I still have to read the contribution docs because there will [always] be something that project does in a very specific and nuanced way that the last project I worked on didn't do. In a lot of cases, people just make mistakes and they don't really think about what they should have been doing. They just need a little more education." –@geekygirldawn

Illustrating contributor risk (18:37): "Some of these big open source projects are maintained by fewer people than you might think. The biggest example I can think of was OpenSSL. There was a huge security vulnerability in OpenSSL. It's a technology that almost every single company in the world relies on. This vulnerability was going to require a lot of time and effort to fix. What we quickly realized was that OpenSSL was maintained part-time by two people, none of whom were being paid to work on it." –@geekygirldawn

To truly be open source means to cede a bit of control (23:20): "You don't, as a company, want to dominate the entire [open source] project because if you do that, you might as well never have open sourced it. You might as well have kept it proprietary. The whole purpose of open sourcing it is you collaborate together, and you innovate, and you get ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise had as a company." –@geekygirldawn

Open source thrives through collaboration (26:41): "Some of the more social platforms, it's like the more social, the better. Collaboration doesn't necessarily work that way. You don't get more collaboration because I did more stuff. You get more collaboration because you got more people involved, and you gave them some space to contribute." –@geekygirldawn

The benefit of neutral foundations for open source projects (29:42): "What you get by putting [an open source] project into these neutral foundations is some assurance that everybody's working together on a level playing field. If I want to contribute to a Linux Foundation project, I can rest assured that I can participate on the same field as everybody else. Whereas, if the project is owned by a particular company and they have their own agenda that may or may not align with the community's best interest, they may take things in a different direction. They may not accept your contribution because it competes with something that they have." –@geekygirldawn

Dawn Foster is the director of open source community strategy within VMware's Open Source Program Office. She is on the board of OpenUK, an organization committed to developing and sustaining UK leadership and open technology. Dawn is on the governing board and is a maintainer for the Linux Foundation's CHAOSS project and the board of advisors for Bitergia. She has 20-plus years of experience at companies like Intel and Puppet Labs, with expertise in community building strategy, open source software, metrics, and more.

Dawn holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich, along with an MBA and Bachelors in Computer Science. She has spoken at dozens of industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM, and more.

• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Dawn Foster on Twitter
• VMware's Open Source Program Office
• OpenUK
• Fast Wonder, Dawn's blog
• Pivotal, which was acquired by VMWare
• The Social Dilemma
• Tristan Harris
• Dirk Hohndel, VMWare's Chief Open Source Officer
• The Linux Foundation
• The Apache Software 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.

On Community Signal, we've spoken to several professionals that have left the industry for other pastures. While their reasons are never exactly the same, there's certainly a trend amongst professionals in the industry, particularly women, who bore the brunt of online abuse.

As Patrick says in this episode, "if you haven't received abuse then you're probably not doing everything you can for your community, that's just a sad reality. I wish that it wasn't the case. I wish that you could somehow maintain order without making yourself a target." In a profession where our responsibilities include moderating conversations, deleting posts, and banning people, yes, it's to be expected that we will make some people unhappy.

But as Patrick and Kellie Parker discuss, it should also be expected that our colleagues and managers understand the realities, toll, and potential dangers of this work and plan for how to support one another through it. The mental and emotional toll of working in community management is real and something that we should all be aware of, no matter what rung of the ladder we're on.

Kellie shares exactly how the mental and emotional aspects of working in community played out for her, where there must be organizational support, and the responsibility of speaking up for our own health and wellbeing. She now speaks openly and candidly about the sexism that she faced, but back then, she admits that her initial reaction was to "be professional" and power through. For professionals that don't have institutional support, another coworker to cover for them, or the flexibility to miss a paycheck or take a personal day, the notion of self-care in the face of abuse may not be as easy as it seems. We hope that Kellie's experience encourages anyone listening to think about how they can better support those that they work with, from an individual perspective and an organizational perspective.

Patrick and Kellie also discuss:

• The sexism faced by women in gaming and community management
• How workplaces can support community managers
• The "magic community wand" and how to work against it

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

No matter how credible a threat is, it still impacts you (6:34): "A lot of rape threats or death threats [that I received] were not serious. I knew it was somebody that was mad because I deleted their posts or I banned them. … But there is a compounding nature over time when you get told 10 times a day, 'I'm going to find your house. I'm going to sneak in your bedroom. I'm going to kill you.' I know that's not really what's going to happen but … there is an emotional cost for that, that is often not addressed." –Kellie Parker

The toll that community management takes on professionals (14:52): "A lot of people who have not done [community management] and do not understand the job shrug their shoulders and say [abuse is] part of the job. Really, we need to be asking for support. Whether it's access to licensed counselors, whether it's rotation in the job. … That portion of the job is not often discussed, and it needs to be. People need to understand that they're putting their mental health and emotional health on the line for this job." –Kellie Parker

The emotional health of your community team matters (23:08): "If you're churning out your community person every 18 months, you should really look internally at why that would be. It can be a number of factors. It doesn't have to be that they are taking abuse. It can be poor compensation, bad workplace environment, whatever, but if people are burning out of that role over and over again, there's probably a greater than 50% chance that [abuse] is the reason." –@patrickokeefe

Institutional knowledge builds stronger communities (25:10): "I want the fans to see me as their inside person at the company, and I want people at the company to see me as their inside person with the fans. If you have new people in that role every six months, every year, every two years; you never get that sustained growth. You never have that institutional knowledge." –Kellie Parker

Stay adept to your team's work (35:25): "If you're in a role where you have to support community professionals, whether you are a director of community, VP of community, or if it just happens to fall under you, you really have to educate yourself on the stresses of this job. If you don't, then you're going to lose people and the people that are reporting up to you are not going to be as efficient in their jobs or as happy and satisfied in their jobs." –@patrickokeefe

When "culture fit" is used as cover for something else (42:53): "I can look around your company, and I can see there is nobody over the age of 30. When you tell me I'm not a culture fit, I know exactly what that means. I am 44 years old. I am female. I am not, by traditional beauty standards, beautiful. That's what you mean. Especially if it's for a community manager role where they want someone to be in front of the community and lead them. I'm not what you're looking for, and you'll tell me it's culture fit." –Kellie Parker

Kellie's career change from social media and community management to real estate (47:14): "Being a real estate agent is about relationships. It's building relationships with people, helping people, taking care of people. That's a lot of [what] my job [was] as a community manager and a social media manager." –Kellie Parker

After discovering chat site Talk City as a user, Kellie Parker ended up taking a job with parent company LiveWorld in 1999. This began a foray into community work that took her to PCWorld, Macworld, and SEGA, where Kellie spent more than six years. This was followed by senior social media jobs at Seasun and healthcare company, Abbott, before leaving the digital space to become a REALTOR.

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• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Kellie Parker
• Kellie Parker's personal Instagram
• Kellie Parker Real Estate on Instagram
• Talk City
• Kellie's resume includes LiveWorld, PCWorld, Macworld, SEGA, Seasun Games, and Abbott
• Sean Dahlberg on Community Signal
• John Coate on Community Signal
• A tweet from Carrie Melissa Jones on "community as the solution"

• 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.

Amy Jo Kim's work building social systems and online experiences for The Sims, Rock Band, Ultima Online, and the New York Times, to name a few, makes her an industry go-to when businesses and clients have questions about creating engaging experiences for gamers, shoppers, and more.

Amy Jo is the author of Community Building on the Web (2000) and Game Thinking (2018). While some think of her as a community professional because of her writing and others know her more for her work in games, Amy Jo sees her work as continuous and intertwined.

She was tackling questions around user incentives and gamification decades ago and even then she thought, "is it too late for me to write a book?" Let's all take that as a lesson that it's never too late to share what we've learned and then, as she says: "Keep going, keep getting better, keep developing new frameworks that give people value."

Patrick and Amy Jo also discuss:

• Amy Jo's experience getting a community book published in 2000
• Why simply just implementing "PBL" (points, badges, and leaderboards) likely won't take your community very far
• Focusing on the "middle" of your community experience
• How inclusivity and diversity factor into game thinking

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

Writing a community book in the late 1990s (3:40): "The thing that motivated me to write [Community Building on the Web] was … that, although this was a new medium, and we were dealing with tech-enabled communities, people are people and the dynamics that have always made communities rise or fall are pretty much the same, whether you're digital or not. … [In the late '90s], there was a lot of, as there is now, breathless hoopla about, 'Oh, it's completely new. We've never seen anything like this.' Yet I felt that there was all this older wisdom about communities that was readily available to us if we wanted to learn from it." –@amyjokim

Sharing your industry experience (6:00): "If you've got something valuable to say, if you can say it in a compelling way people understand; [being] late/early doesn't matter so much. … Get the thing that you have to state out into the world so people can react to it. That's an incredibly powerful thing." –@amyjokim

Be thoughtful about your gamification practices (20:42): "If you want to capture the magic of games in your product, it really has a lot more to do with building the right systems than sprinkling [points, badges, and leaderboards] on top." –@amyjokim

Give your superusers the opportunity to make an impact (35:46): "Find some way for your most dedicated customers to play a role in the community that gives them impact. People like swag, they like being paid, they like being praised. They like all of that, but there's nothing that can beat having an impact on a community you care about." –@amyjokim

Making diversity part of your design process (41:04): "If you're building something new, and you want it to be inclusive, find people from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, different skin tones, different religions, whatever it is that you want to be inclusive about. Actively recruit early adopters from those groups and make sure that their voice is heard at the beginning and then throughout." –@amyjokim

Onboarding is important, but… (47:36): "There are so many apps, communities, marketplaces, and services that fail because they [just] have great onboarding. They took to heart that onboarding is so important. … What about day five? What about day ten? There's nothing there. It's so common. The reason it's common is it's much easier to design pretty onboarding than to figure out your core loop. It's actually the hardest part. It's the part that's going to drive retention." –@amyjokim

Named by Fortune as one of the top 10 influential women in games, Amy Jo Kim is a game designer, community architect, and innovation coach. Her design credits include Rock Band, The Sims, eBay, Netflix, nytimes.com, Ultima Online, Covet Fashion, and Happify. Amy Jo has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators bring their ideas to life through her coaching programs at gamethinking.io. She pioneered the practice of applying game design to digital services and is well known for her books, Community Building on the Web, from 2000, and Game Thinking, from 2018.

In addition to her coaching practice, Amy Jo teaches game thinking at Stanford University and the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she co-founded the game design program. She holds a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington and a BA in Experimental Psychology from UCSD.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Amy Jo Kim on Twitter
• Amy Jo's books: Community Building on the Web (2000) and Game Thinking (2018)
• Patrick's book, Managing Online Forums
• We reference a few of Amy Jo's past clients and workplaces, including Shiseido, Ultima Online, League of Legends, and Rock Band
• Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community
• Howard Rheingold on Community Signal
• John Hagel's Net Gain
• Patrick on community texts being as relevant today as when they were first published
• Derek Powazek's Design for Community
• When Leaderboards Backfire
• The Tribunal policy for League of Legends
• Building Inclusive Communities, Workplaces, and an Inclusive Profession

• 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're reading this, we're guessing that you are in the community management profession. Hi, how are you holding up? Between the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and too many other Black people, ongoing protests for an end to systemic racism and inequality, and a looming presidential election that has a lot riding on it, life has been more challenging than usual, to say the least. And as community managers, we're at the center of many of these conversations.

Whether we're creating spaces for people to safely discuss these challenging topics, working to build and foster diverse communities and teams, or helping companies make the leap to a fully digital workplace, our skills and work are in high demand.

In this episode of Community Signal, Patrick speaks to three community professionals about how current events have impacted their lives and how they think about building inclusive communities. In the day-to-day, that might mean guiding conversations within our communities. In the broader sense, it's thinking about how we build communities, tools, and platforms that have diversity, equity, inclusion, and the knowledge from our collective decades of experience in community management baked in from day one.

As our guest Bassey Etim puts it, "we stand on the shoulders of the people before us, and we're Called, and I mean 'called' with a capital C, Called to try to make this a more fair and just world."

Listen to Patrick, Bassey, Marjorie Anderson, and Nina Collins as they discuss the following and more:

• Supporting hard conversations in spaces where they need to happen
• Building platforms that encourage diversity and stamp out racism
• Identifying broader candidate groups when hiring
• Designing systems that allow for proper flagging of abuse

If you enjoy our show, please know that it's only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

On fostering communities that embody inclusivity and empathy (3:55): "What's the tone that you set the minute that people sign up to come into your community and participate? What does that look and feel like? If it's not one where it feels like people can speak up and have their voices be heard, then it's really hard to course-correct [later on] and start to cultivate that feeling of belonging." –@MarjorieAyyeee

Is the time for sarcasm over? (21:35): "Earnesty, applied over time, just wins people over. It's hard to combat it with sarcasm, irony, anger, all of those things." –@BasseyE

Do paid communities encourage less moderation and more ownership? (22:10): "I'm finding now on The Woolfer community, we have people who behave; people are in bad moods, people are feeling sensitive sometimes, but generally, they are much more earnest, and I've attributed it to the fact that they're paying for it, that people value things they pay for so they take better care of the space." -Nina Collins

When what you share is what people will hold against you (37:34): "There is always this Libertarian utopian edge to [Mark Zuckerberg's] promises and the promise of the internet where once we free ourselves of all of our clothing, once we put everything we are out there and everybody else is naked, it'll be like, 'Oh, well we're all naked. Whatever.' It turns out that some people, even when they're naked, they're going to be extremely judgmental about it. I don't think this was necessarily something that was unknowable from the perspective of a lot of the folks who built platforms that undergird the internet today." –@BasseyE

Talking to your community members (in a real way!) about the issues that impact their lives:

"Open up the conversation gently. It doesn't have to be, 'What do you think of Black Lives Matter?' It can be, 'This is an unprecedented time that we're in. I want to know how you're feeling,' and let them talk. … You know there are people who are likely hurting and [if] you ignore that, how much does that make them feel like this is the community for them?" –@MarjorieAyyeee (51:23)

"This moment is a real moment for humility and for people to show up vulnerable and honest and careful about boundaries, but to be able to really talk about [race and racism] is vitally important. We've tried to make the space for them to do that." -Nina Collins (55:08)

Our responsibility as leaders and community builders (1:23:16): "The domination of the major [social media] platforms isn't infinite. It's going to end one day. It's our responsibility to think about what we are going to build in its place." –@BasseyE

Choosing to talk about race (1:26:54): "As someone who runs a community for women over 40, where we talk a lot about sex, health, and relationships, I'm known in my little teeny world for talking about anything. I'll talk about my vagina. But I realized I was not talking about race with these women. Here I am, a Black woman running a community of lots of white women, and I was never talking about race. I've decided that's over. I'm going to be having these conversations, and I'm okay with it." -Nina Collins

On the responsibility of speaking up for diversity and inclusion within our organization (1:28:27): "As Black folks in America, if we're in positions in organizations where we have voices that are going to be listened to, a big part of the legacy is that we stand on the shoulders of the people before us, and we're Called, and I mean 'called' with a capital C, to try to make this a more fair and just world. … We need to be agitating for getting professionals who can work on these things. We need to be agitating for change. … For folks who do have the emotional energy to be able to deal with this, I definitely encourage you to make your voice heard." –@BasseyE

Change will come (1:30:47): "Things do change, but they don't change if you lose your energy." –@BasseyE

Bassey Etim is the editorial director for CNN's NewsCo. He was previously the community editor at the New York Times.

Marjorie Anderson is the manager of digital communities at Project Management Institute and she also manages Community by Association, a resource for community builders in the association space.

Nina Collins is a writer, entrepreneur, and the founder of The Woolfer, an online platform for like-minded women over forty.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community
• Twitter's rules and policies
• Gordian knot
• A Complete Breakdown of the J.K. Rowling Transgender-Comments Controversy
• Thomas Chatterton Williams on Race, Identity, and "Cancel Culture"
• Supporting Hard Conversations
• Rachel Cargle's the Great Unlearn
• Woolfer TV
• Community Thrive! Virtual Summit 2020
• Marjorie on Community Signal
• Toxic Waters by Charles Duhigg
• The Program Management Improvement Accountability Act (PMIAA)
• The WeSupport newsletter and Twitter
• Facebook's Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men From Hate Speech But Not Black Children
• "You are what you tolerate." –– Derek Powazek on Community Signal

• 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.

How many virtual conferences and events have you attended recently? Now compare that to the amount of time you've spent playing video games during the past few months. Not giving too much away, Patrick and I would probably agree that we've spent more time on the latter. With screen time dominating our lives and in-person gatherings largely on hold, how can we rise to the challenge of bringing communities together in accessible, refreshing, and fun ways?

In this episode of Community Signal, principal developer advocate Austin Parker shares how he used tools like Twitch, OBS, Discord, and yes, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, to throw a deserted island conference like no other. Austin doesn't expect every conference from here on out to be hosted in the video game, but he does hope that the pandemic and his experience with Deserted Island DevOps encourages all of us to think outside of the box when it comes to creating experiences for our communities. In his words: "You don't have to be an expert, you don't have to be a master event planner. You don't need $10,000 to go rent a ballroom at the Sheraton. You can make something that's engaging, and creative, that people like, and people will come and listen to it. You can share knowledge and you can build a community using stuff that is either free or fairly inexpensive."

Austin and Patrick also talk about:

• Pros and cons of in-person and virtual events
• The moderation tools, volunteers, and code of conduct that helped make Deserted Island DevOps happen nearly seamlessly
• How Austin grinded to get enough bells to pull off the conference

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 has the pandemic changed work for developer advocates? (2:30): "[Because of COVID-19], we're in a world where there's this antipathy or bias against large-scale events for the foreseeable future. And maybe not even on a month's time scale, on a multi-year timescale, we really have to rethink what does it mean to be part of a developer community? … How do you build events and get people interested in events that don't take you out of your normal routine?" –@austinlparker

Going virtual with attention to accessibility and inclusivity (7:53): "Virtual events as a longer-term strategy are actually really good. It's very accessible. There's a ton of people due to whatever reason, because of where they are in the world, because of a disability or because it's unsafe, or due to their gender or sexuality, in-person events aren't welcoming. A virtual event can be much safer for people to attend and much more accessible and egalitarian than these $5,000 hotel and plane and then $2,000 ticket [conferences]." –@austinlparker

Moderation as a continual practice (23:36): "Moderation is never going to be 100%. It's never going to work 100%. [There will always be] the fallibility of technology and of people. Getting close enough is the goal and just fixing any mistakes we find along the way." –@patrickokeefe

A few tools and a little creativity can go a long way towards creating memorable experiences (34:44): "The future I see [for virtual events] is one where people are using very easy-to-access prosumer tools in order to create unique experiences and build communities around those. It's less [about using Animal Crossing like I did] and more you don't have to be an expert, you don't have to be a master event planner. You don't need $10,000 or $20,000 to go rent a ballroom at the Sheraton. You can make something that's engaging, creative, and that people like, and people will come and listen to it. You can share knowledge and you can build a community using stuff that is either free or fairly inexpensive." –@austinlparker

Austin Parker has been solving –– and creating –– problems with computers and technology for most of his life. He is the principal developer advocate at Lightstep and maintainer on the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects. Austin is the host of On-Call Me Maybe and co-author of Distributed Tracing in Practice, published by O'Reilly Media.

• Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community
• Austin Parker on Twitter
• Lightstep
• Recordings of the content from Deserted Island DevOps
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Community Thrive!: Virtual Summit 2020
• Deserted Island DevOps Postmortem
• Open Broadcaster OBS
• Elgato Stream Deck
• The Code of Conduct for Deserted Island DevOps
• On-Call Me Maybe podcast, which Austin hosts

• 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.