Community Signal

On this episode of Community Signal, community management consultant Tanja Laub gives a full report on what it's like to work as a community manager in Germany. And perhaps not too surprising, the experience is not dissimilar to what guests from the United States and other countries have described. Tanja shares a breakdown of community manager responsibilities, typical salaries, and the limitations and opportunities that she's seen in the field so far.

Tanja is also a chairperson for BVCM, an association for Germany community managers, where she has helped develop a certification procedure for community and social media managers. Rather than requiring professionals to take a class to become certified, community managers instead verify their professional history and some other details about themselves to get the certification. Between that and her work to help organizations refine their hiring needs and community manager role descriptions, Tanja is helping to set the standard for what it means to work in community management.

Tanja and Patrick also discuss:

• The value of certifications
• How moderation norms compare to other countries, like Australia and the United States
• What Tanja sees as areas of opportunity for communities in Germany

On building your community with your community (18:40): "If you're [making] changes [to the community] without them knowing, [community members will ask:] 'Why didn't you tell me? Why did you change that?' Even if it's a minor thing. The greatest [thing] … would be to develop the community together with the users, to ask them in advance, 'How do you want to have that feature? What works best for you? Here are two versions, look at them, work with them. Which one do you want to have? Which one shall we put into the community? What kinds of changes should we make?'" –@TanjaOnTour

Tanja Laub has worked in community management since 2006. She spoke communities for a big European media company RTL Media Group, including one about cooking, the other for women, and was head of community for Douglas, a perfume chain, essentially the European Sephora.

Since 2010, she has been a community and social media management consultant with a focus on own platforms. Tanja also gives trainings and workshops. Since 2017, she has been the chairwoman of BVCM, a German association for professional community and social media managers. They're offering certifications and define the job descriptions to help companies better understand who they want to hire and what they need. The organization also conducts a survey to better know the market and problems of their professionals.

• Tanja Laub on Twitter
• Walkabout Media
• CommunityManagement.de
• RTL Media Group and Douglas, where Tanja previously worked
• BVCM, the Federal Association for Community Managers
• 2019 Australian Community Managers Career Survey
• Community builder, manager, and strategist Venessa Paech
• Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, or NetzDG
• Bianca Oertel, a community professional who works at Motor Talk
• Chefkoch, a cooking and baking community
• Voycer, a software company focused on the German market
• Article by Tanja about the role of a community manager on company-owned platforms
• Julie Hamel 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.

On Community Signal, we talk to community professionals across all industries, from gaming, to healthcare, to photography, and more. And while our respective communities might convene over different topics, the tactics and tools that we employ to foster healthy communities are largely the same. In this episode, Craig Dalrymple shares how his community career started in gaming and how that knowledge has carried him into other industries.

Patrick and Craig also get on the topic of customer success, the rise of roles in this space, and how community professionals can have an impact. But no matter what team you're on or what your title is, what's most important is that you feel empowered in your role and that you have the tools to succeed. As Craig says (8:48): "Can I do something here? Can I move the needle? Can I take this community and make it happier and bind it better with this product that they're getting together around?"

They also discuss:

• Balancing being yourself and a community manager in your online presence
• Finding opportunities to surprise and delight (potential) customers outside of your community
• When your employer wants metrics they won't adequately give you access to

Adapting your discipline to your company's org structure (7:55): "I've always tried to think like a chameleon. Whenever you go into a company, they're going to put you where they think you belong. ... This is just another version of that question of where does the community person belong? For me, it's can you have a satisfactory job? Because if you don't have a satisfactory job, in my opinion, if you're not happy working, that's the time to question your job. But if you can have a job that you're satisfied with and have the impact you want, it doesn't matter where they put you." -Craig Dalrymple

Determining your company's success language (21:09): "I've always taught people to figure out what the language of success is at [your workplace]. It doesn't matter what it was in your last job, it's where you're at right now. What does this company respond to? What resonates and gets everybody to go, 'Oh, that's important.'" -Craig Dalrymple

Craig Dalrymple got his start in online communities when he helped configure Confer as a class discussion tool for his alma mater, Western Michigan University. Since then, Craig has served in the US Army and later found his way back into gaming communities by way of Sony, Zynga, and more.

• Craig Dalrymple on LinkedIn
• Confer
• Sony, Zynga, and The Project Management Institute, Craig's former employers
• Gabe Graziani of Ubisoft on Community Signal
• Zack Cooper of Ubisoft on Community Signal
• Joe King on Community Signal
• Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer

• 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.

A few weeks ago, the Community Signal team was discussing the upcoming schedule for the show and talking about the then recent news that Ravelry had decided to ban any pro-Trump related content. Community guidelines and how we moderate conversations in our respective communities are frequent topics on Community Signal, and it's also something that we work on everyday as community professionals. If you're contemplating new community guidelines, revising your existing ones, or debating a tough moderation decision, this episode has some terrific insights from Heather Champ.

Sharing stories from her time guiding community at Flickr, Tumblr, and more, it's most interesting to hear from Heather not about exciting new tools and automations, but instead about how much empowering community members with options, filters, and clear community guidelines can create flourishing spaces for expression. Heather also brings up a very important topic –– the level of vulnerability that community managers face in their jobs and the repercussions of trolling and stalking as we become more deeply embedded in our communities. With Heather's experience comes deep insights and knowledge, but also a clear message that we need to pay attention to the roles and protections that we're building for community managers and our communities.

Patrick and Heather discuss:

• Why algorithms can't replace moderators
• How Flickr created a safe space for sharing adult content
• The role that Section 230 plays in fostering healthy conversations for everyone, including community managers

Defining clear community guidelines and sticking to them (8:10): "A company can decide what is and isn't appropriate and then have the strength to stand up and say we're not going to tolerate this behavior because you are, as a company, what you allow people to post." –Heather Champ

The role of humor in community management (38:52): "As people who are representing the voice of a company or representing trying to talk about these things, where I see things go off the rails is people not understanding that while you can always make fun of yourself or the company as a whole, you can't use humor to make fun of other people or even other individuals within your company. I love making fun of myself. That's not a problem. Just be very careful of what might come across like your humor at somebody else's expense." –Heather Champ

How Section 230 protects those you agree with and those you don't (47:59):"Section 230 is the same law that protected me when I was 13 years old and started moderating content. It's the same law that protects me now. [It applies to] big companies, small companies. It's the thing that says that you can have a space where you can say, 'This isn't okay.' It doesn't matter what that is. If you want to start a community and you're a Republican and you want to make it so that no one can say bad things about the president, Section 230 has got your back. You can do that." –@patrickokeefe

On the implications of working in community management (54:41): "Flickr was the best of times and the worst of times. It was absolutely magical, but a lot of what happened there has had a lasting impact. I'm on a [Department of Justice] victims list for extortion because somebody was upset that their account was deleted and they threatened to put my face on pornography and flood it out there. … Subsequently to that, I was at a different company where I insisted on having a persona because I was so completely freaked out by … other issues with harassment and stalking that happened." –Heather Champ

Heather Champ built her first homepage in 1994 and has worked online ever since. Joining Flickrimmediately after the acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, she cowrote Flickr's community guidelines, which became a template for best practices around the web.

Heather has led community teams at Flickr, Findery, and FiftyThree and consulted with Tumblr, Etsy, and VSCO. Enamored with photography, she created The Mirror Project (1999–2005), a website that celebrated self-portraiture well before "selfies" were a thing, and cofounded JPG Magazine, the photography magazine made by its community. She lives outside of Portland on two acres with her husband and continues to learn new things about communities from their dogs, goats, chickens, and turkeys.

• Heather Champ on Instagram
• Flickr
• The Mirror Project
• JPG Magazine
• Facebook's $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
• Twitter's rules
• Derek Powazek on Community Signal
• The Right Way to Build an Online Community: 3 Rules From Investor and Flickr Cofounder Caterina Fake
• Ravelry bans Trump support: why a popular knitting website's anti-Trump stanceis so significant
• Milk Barn Farm Tumblr
• Tom Coates' take on Flickr
• #RollFilmWeek
• Flickr's safe, moderate, and restricted content definitions
• DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
• Flickr's community guidelines, which Heather co-wrote with George Oates
• David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on Community Signal
• WeTransfer, where Heather currently works
• Senator Ron Wyden, Christopher Cox, and Senator Ed Markey
• The Telecommunications Act of 1996
• SESTA and FOSTA

• 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 games, social media, or community management, then you know that running any communications or programming around conventions like E3 and PAX requires intense planning and coordination. Fresh off of his first on the ground activation at E3, Joe King, social media manager for GameStop, shares the ups and downs of working conventions and of working in games community management. He also shares his strategy for engaging with games communities whether he is walking the convention floor for the first time or covering the event on social media from a remote location.

Joe's career path into community management started with his love of games and quickly accelerated when he got creative with his resume. His advice for those looking to get into community management or any other field stands out: Start small, with tangible projects that can level up your skills.

Joe and Patrick discuss:

• What Joe did to make his resume standout when he was applying for a community position at Gearbox Software
• Why numbers don't matter when you're starting out as a streamer
• How landing a "dream job" can feel simultaneously exciting and paralyzing

Authentic content is a must for any community: "I really love [working with] influencers, because the really smart ones know that you shouldn't get caught up in your numbers for a while. Start your channel and then just start making things. Start streaming. … Then eventually, as your content gets better and better and more people see it, they're going to realize that it's authentic, and there's value in it. It's going to naturally grow [and] your audience is going to naturally grow." –@jauxking

Battling imposter syndrome when starting a new career path: "When I left [my first job in gaming], I realized that the amount of fear and anxiety that I was living with every day was crippling. … Then I left, and I realized that it was never about the job in terms of what I was doing, it was about the job in terms of what I had. I was so scared to lose it that I didn't have the confidence that I used to have. … It took leaving to get where I am now." –@jauxking

Joe King runs social media initiatives for GameStop. He is the former community manager for Gearbox Software and Gearbox Publishing, and has worked on such games as Borderlands, Battleborn, We Happy Few, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, and many more.

He recently launched Just Press Start, a podcast in which he chats with friends in the gaming industry and adjacent disciplines about what they do, how they got started, and what advice they can offer others (including him!) on how they can best achieve their personal or professional goals, rooted in gaming or not!

• Joe King on Twitter and Instagram
• Just Press Start –– Joe's podcast
• Gamestop, where Joe works in social media management
• The tweet that Patrick posted when he first launched Community Signal
• E3, PAX, and Gamescom
• Joe also worked at Gearbox Software and Gearbox Publishing, and has worked on such games as Borderlands, Battleborn, We Happy Few, and Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition
• Brad Williams, CEO and co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, former guest on Community Signal
• Courtney Caldwell, senior community manager at GameStop
• Major Nelson Radio
• More than 1,500 people have lost their jobs in the games industry in three months

• 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 would the internet change if Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is repealed? For U.S.-based online communities and the professionals that work for them, not for the better. In fact David Greene, senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that some websites and communities would disappear altogether. They simply wouldn't be able to exist with the risk that republishing content could bring.

If you want to talk to your colleagues, your community, or your elected officials about how Section 230 protects everyone who uses and works on the internet, consider this episode your primer. Patrick and David also discuss misconceptions about Section 230 and why it's important for all community professionals to pay attention to attempts to repeal this law.

Here's what's covered:

• The basics of Section 230, including who it protects and how
• How FOSTA intended to regulate sex trafficking and ultimately regulated so much more
• What elected officials are saying and hearing about Section 230

A summary of the protections that Section 230 provides: "Section 230 provides an immunity from liability for any internet … user or service provider for republishing somebody else's content. Whereas, in another situation, you might have borne some legal liability because you republished something somebody else said or wrote, when you do that online, you cannot be liable for that. … [For example,] if you forward an email and the email you forward has awful stuff in it, you can't be liable because the content you forwarded harmed somebody in some way. The original person who wrote the email can, but you just merely as the intermediary who forwarded the email cannot." –@davidgreene

How Section 230 protects us all, not just "Big Tech": "Section 230 protects any person or any entity that publishes other people's content online. That is pretty much every person and entity that I know. There's nothing in its language that limits it to Big Tech. I actually hear this a lot from my friends in the legacy news media community who feel like Big Tech got this statutory advantage that they don't have. I always tell them, 'Look, you publish online. You publish news online. Some of you are exclusively online news, and you enjoy the same protection when you are an intermediary, when you publish wire service stories, when you publish reader comments, when you publish advertisements. All these things are not your own content. You get the exact same protection that anybody, that Big Tech does, regardless of what that means.'" –@davidgreene

What community managers can do to protect Section 230: "Pay attention to efforts to limit Section 230. I think it's actually really helpful even now just to contact your elected officials and to explain to them why it's important to you. … They are constantly hearing from people who are blaming the whole litany of woes on Section 230 and who are talking about the bad anecdotes because Section 230 undoubtedly does protect bad actors. Any immunity is going to do that. It's going to protect the good actors and the bad actors. Members of Congress tend to hear a lot of the bad actors' stories. That's what causes them to want to legislate." –@davidgreene

David Greene is the senior staff attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has significant experience litigating First Amendment issues in state and federal trial and appellate courts and is one of the country's leading advocates for and commentators on freedom of expression in the arts.

• David Greene on Twitter
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
• Law professor Eric Goldman on Community Signal
• FOSTA and how it has impacted the internet
• The Internet Society
• Engine
• Section 230 Is Not A Special "Tech Company" Immunity
• Ron Wyden, Ed Markey, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren
• Backpage

• View transcript on 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 did you first realize that community management was an actual job? Many of the guests on Community Signal, including Patrick and this week's guest, Shreyas Narayanan Kutty, got their start in community management by volunteering for causes or topics that they were passionate about. After building communities as a volunteer for the Mozilla Foundation, Shreyas found himself surrounded by community professionals and realized that he wanted to take his work full-time.

Shreyas now manages the developer relations community for CoinList, and with seven years of experience managing communities, he has observed a lot of positive change in how the community profession is perceived in India.

Patrick and Shreyas discuss:

• How they each came to the realization that community management can be a viable job
• Opportunities for growth and specialization in the community management profession
• The practices and guidelines that lay the foundation for successful developer communities

Community management as a career in India: "[In India] the job seeker layer understands communities now … but I think change really comes when the top layer, or the hiring layer, really understands communities. When they say, 'We know that this is how our business can benefit [from community]; this is the ROI of communities.' They've taken that decision to invest in it. That's when you understand that this [career] is successful." –@dun3buggi3

On searching for community management jobs: "When I was looking for the job in community … a lot of these companies were really looking for business development or sales or growth hacking. They were just sugar coating it with the title 'community manager,' which was really interesting to me because I know that for them it sounded appealing but they really didn't want to invest in communities. I've actually had that conversation with founders where I'm telling them that, 'This is a wrong understanding of community, this is not what community management is. If you really want to invest in communities, you probably should think about it this way and not what you're doing right now.'" –@dun3buggi3

Getting started in community management: "When we go to events, when people just come up to me and say, 'How do I get a role? How do I get started in this industry?,' I tell them that if you're really passionate about it, there's nothing that can stop you. I know it sounds like a cliché, but there's nothing that can stop you from achieving that. My first go-to tips are try to volunteer for an organization that you really care about. Then eventually that might get converted to a paid position but don't do it because you're motivated by that, do it because you genuinely care about the cause." –@dun3buggi3

Setting a standard for how we communicate about our work: "We've talked about these exact things on the show, community management versus social media management and the confusion there. For me, it's the difference between tools and strategy, that's how I try to simplify for people. Social media is a toolset. It's a toolset that's used by marketing, by human resources, by customer service. Community is a strategy you apply to a toolset. It's a different set of goals and beliefs." –@patrickokeefe

Shreyas Narayanan Kutty is a community manager primarily based in Bangalore, India. A computer science engineer by education, he succumbed to the lure of building communities and took up community management as a full-time profession. He recently joined the CoinList team to work on their developer community. Shreyas is also a volunteer with the Mozilla Foundation.

Shreyas is passionate about digital inclusion and building an open and accessible web. He runs Community Managers India, a resource for professionals with questions about the industry.

• Shreyas Narayanan Kutty's website
• Shreyas on Twitter
• CoinList, where Shreyas works on their developer community
• Shreyas's contributions to Mozilla
• Community Managers India on Twitter
• Swarm Conference, Australia's community management conference
• Vanessa Paech on Community Signal
• Telegram, a messaging app
• VK, also known as VKontakte
• Instagram to test hiding public likes count in Canada

• 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 Trello was acquired by Atlassian, Erica Moss went from being a team of one to a community manager with a supportive and specialized team. With this came the challenge of supporting Atlassian's Community Leaders program, a group of Atlassian experts that share their knowledge with others. Tasked with taking the community from a Q&A forum to something more, Erica focused on what she thought would keep community members coming back and the "warm fuzzies" that would help community leaders define their tone and new members feel welcome.

And while Erica has grown the Community Leaders program from 60 to 128 members, it's not quantity that she's optimizing for. Because Community Leaders are representatives of Atlassian's products and brand, she's focused on finding leaders that can speak with accuracy about the suite of products and with a thoughtful tone.

In this episode of Community Signal, Erica talks about what makes the Community Leaders program successful and a value-add for its members. She and Patrick also discuss:

• The different roles on Atlassian's community team and why specialization is so important
• Foursquare's 10-year anniversary and why Erica is proud to be a superuser
• The "invisible work" involved in community management and how Erica's team brings transparency to their work

The story behind the Atlassian community: "Initially, the community looked more like a Q&A forum. Someone would post a question, users who felt that they could offer any value would jump in and it was very transactional. That works in some context but I think what we find with products in the Atlassian suite specifically is there's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of value in [having] multiple opinions. … We really wanted to double down on that and nurture that, so that's where you see two years ago where we switched from a Q&A forum to what is now our community built on Lithium. In doing so [we said], 'We really want to create a sense of ownership and a sense of, "Let's really build this thing that we know is special and we know is magical." Let's get some stewards of the community and really create some ownership there.'" –@EricaJMoss

On building a community that's a conversation space: "If I think the community is not welcoming or approachable, I can treat it as a transaction. … What is my motivation to come back? What are the warm fuzzies? Why should I invest my time with these other humans?" –@EricaJMoss

Advocating for your work will make you a better community professional: "As community managers sometimes it's tough for us to be advocates for ourselves and champions for ourselves. I had a conversation with someone recently on the team because it doesn't always feel natural, and it doesn't feel easy to toot your own horn and say, 'Hey, I did this and this was the impact of it.' It's so important, and I think the more cognizant you are of it, and the more you practice that, the better you will be as a community professional overall." –@EricaJMoss

With roots in journalism, Erica Moss marries her background as a professional storyteller with her passion for connecting people as the senior manager of community engagement at Atlassian, helping to nurture and grow the Community Leaders program. Outside of work, she loves theater, photography, TV, pop culture, hyperbole, and cured meats.

• Erica Moss on Twitter and Instagram
• The Atlassian Community
• Atlassian's Community Leaders Program
• How to become an Atlassian Community Leader
• Stack Overflow
• Let Me Google That For You
• The Atlassian Authors Program
• Foursquare and Swarm

• 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.

For all of of the convenience and value that tech companies and platforms provide, we're also starting to see just how much they take away. In this episode, Michael Wood-Lewis, the co-founder of Front Porch Forum, shares how big tech facilitates connections between people, but at both a monetary and social cost.

In this episode, Michael and Patrick discuss how tech platforms optimize for engagement, back and forth between their users. But Front Porch Forum optimizes for actual conversations, not just online, but in person around civic engagement, and for things like borrowing a ladder or finding a plumber. If we take these conversations back, what happens to big tech?

Michael also shares:

• The importance of authenticity on Front Porch Forum
• What happened when local politicians realized the power of engaging with constituents through Front Porch Forum
• How Front Porch Forum creates the feeling of a neighborhood block party online

How big tech removes autonomy from local communities: "A vibrant local community, part of it is a functional local government. You need engaged citizens, and you need a vibrant local business sector if you want to have a healthy community. … It's hard to do that in the age of Amazon and Facebook." -Michael Wood-Lewis

On the pacing of discussions on Front Porch Forum: "What's the benefit of rushing [to post]? On more than one occasion, I have seen a topic heat up in the neighborhood where I live on Front Porch Forum and at the same time heat up on Facebook or Twitter. I have to tell you, the tone of those venues is radically different. On Facebook or Twitter, it's instantaneous, it's back and forth. … There's something that doesn't encourage our best selves oftentimes in this rapid exchange environment." -Michael Wood-Lewis

Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife, Valerie Wood­-Lewis, founded FrontPorchForum.com in 2006, driven to help neighbors connect and build community. More than half of their state participates daily.

Born and raised in Indiana, Michael graduated from the University of Illinois with a master's in engineering and an MBA. He and Valerie met while working in Washington DC, married, and have been raising a family in Vermont for the past 20 years.

When not working on FPF, you can find Michael hanging out in their neighborhood, Five Sisters, coaching youth sports, or enjoying Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains.

• Michael Wood-Lewis on LinkedIn
• Front Porch Forum on Twitter
• Front Porch Forum
• The story of Vermont's quiet digital revolution
• How a Vermont social network became a model for online communities
• Escape from Facebookistan

• 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 working on launching a new community initiative, there are so many case studies, tools, and knowledgeable community professionals to help you along your journey. But what if you're tasked with sunsetting a community?

In this conversation, Patrick and Luke Zimmer, manager of the educator community for the National Geographic Society, discuss both instances. Luke has been tasked with managing the community for educators interested in geography education and after evaluating the limited capabilities of Google Plus, decided to go with a platform that offered more in the way of customization and data ownership. And, plot twist: Not long after making this decision, Google announced that it would be sunsetting its Google Plus consumer product, including the Google Plus Communities product.

Launching a new community or sunsetting an existing one are both complex undertakings. As Luke puts it, our online communities are microcosms of the culture around us. What happens when that culture and those connections are wiped away?

Patrick and Luke also discuss:

• A full rundown of the Google Plus Communities sunset
• Why having an anthropology background is helpful for working in community
• How the National Geographic Society is structuring its new online community and plans to measure success

Online communities as microcosms of larger cultural movements: "When an organization chooses to foster a community like [IMDb did], they're choosing to support a subculture of that particular group. When they choose to stop supporting that community, you're essentially getting rid of that subculture, and you're wiping out a culture. It's unfortunate that that happens. … [But] in the grand scheme of things, that happens all the time, throughout history. Cultures, they rise and they fall and they ebb and they flow. It's natural for online communities to follow that similar pattern. That's one of the things that really fascinates me about online communities, that it really becomes a microcosm for these larger cultural cycles that we see throughout history." –@LukeTZimmer

On migrating a community from Google Plus Communities to Higher Logic:"Google Plus has four metrics that they give you. That's just not enough if you're really looking at the return on investment of your community. You need [a community platform] that really provides detailed support for programs and multiple programs, like National Geographic has for its educators. … I was definitely supportive of finding a platform that could integrate with our customer relationship management system, and making sure that we had as much access to our member data as possible." –@LukeTZimmer

Opening a closed community to the public: "Because it's been a closed community and we've been working with a very specific population, even within our audience, it's been pretty easy to understand the community and to manage their expectations and the culture of the community. One of the things that I'm most concerned about [is] opening up a private community to the public [and] maintaining that culture, that positivity that we have currently in our closed community and making sure that inviting these new populations in doesn't throw off the balance." –@LukeTZimmer

Luke Zimmer graduated from Indiana University with degrees in journalism and anthropology. He has worked with associations and nonprofits for more than five years with a specific interest in social media and online communities.

In addition to his work as a community manager with the National Geographic Society, Luke also volunteers with the American Society of Association Executives where he is chair of the ASAE Communication Section Council. He has spoken at a number of ASAE events in addition to contributing to the ASAE newsletter, Associations Now.

Luke has also spoken to webinar audiences for the online community platform Higher Logic, the National Association of Bar Executives, and AssociationSuccess.org. When he finds the time, Luke also blogs on community management, social media, and technology news and issues at Skariphos.com.

• Luke Zimmer on Twitter
• National Geographic Education
• Luke's blog, Skariphos.com
• The American Society of Association Executives
• Higher Logic
• The National Association of Bar Executives
• AssociationSuccess.org
• Elizabeth Koenig on Community Signal
• IMDb shutters its online community
• National Science Teachers Association Conference
• Google Plus shares plans to shutter its consumer product
• Google Takeout allows you to download all of your Google-stored data
• Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship Program

• View transcript on 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 you thought about that blank text field where members of your community can leave comments? That text field and blinking cursor are the closest we have to pauses between human interaction on the internet. In this episode, Perspective's product manager, Cj Adams, encourages us to think about how we might innovate that text field and blinking cursor in hopes of having more inclusive, difficult, and natural conversations.

Cj also explains how Perspective can help. Its API has a variety of ways that can be implemented, all with the goal of perceiving the impact a comment might have on a conversation. But Cj also explains that machine learning is is not flawless, and he reminds us that the humans responsible for training it are what encourages its actual biases. So, just like with any other tool that you consider for your community, think about how you can implement it with your community in mind and not as the be all, end all solution for creating better conversations.

Cj also shares:

• How Perspective creates a conversation around moderation
• Why Perspective is a tool for communities small and large
• What machine learning does when it's "really stupid"

Using machine learning to encourage community-minded conversations: "People can be a little too focused on how good is the machine learning, or what is the exact technology behind it, [but] a lot of it comes down to what's the actual user experience? What does that feel like to type something in? That idea of just giving someone a moment when they submit [a comment] to give them some feedback instead of moderating after the fact is a really powerful thing. … It's a little bit more like when you're in a human conversation." –@adamscj

The bias in teaching machines: "There are three main types of machine learning. Supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and then reinforcement learning. What we are talking about here is supervised learning, where you put in a bunch of training data and machine learning is trying to identify patterns in that data and then be able to, in this case, classify new examples to say what this does or doesn't look like. One of the things that you have to recognize is that it's going to be as smart or as dumb as what it learns from. … Machine learning is only as right as whatever the data was that it was trained on." –@adamscj

Addressing the challenge of an empty text box and a blinking cursor: "In a lot of forums, we have an empty white box with a blinking cursor, and that's how we talk to other humans. … Is there anything we could do here that's a little more creative, a structure that might facilitate less toxicity, that might facilitate people to understand the humanity of the people they're talking to? I don't know what that answer is there. I am excited by trying to figure out how we might nudge people in a direction towards understanding people they disagree with, listening to people, learning and sharing their views in a way that fosters understanding and fosters people being able to keep talking even when they disagree." –@adamscj

Cj Adams is a product manager at Jigsaw, part of Alphabet (Google), focused on building technology to make people safer around the world. Since 2015 he has been the product manager of Perspective, an API that helps communities and platforms use machine learning to protect voices in conversation.

Previously he led Project Shield, a free DDoS mitigation service for news organizations and before Google, he helped build a national confidential hotline for victims of human trafficking at a non-profit called Polaris.

• Cj Adams on Twitter
• Jigsaw
• Perspective
• Project Shield, a free DDOS mitigation service from Google
• Polaris, a hotline for victims of human trafficking
• Bassey Etim, editorial director at Canopy
• Andrew Losowsky, project lead of the Coral Project
• Greg Barber, co-founder of the Coral Project
• Project Respect, a machine learning training program by Google
• Twitter sabotages Tay Bot, Microsoft's AI chatbot
• The False Positive
• Change My View on Reddit

• View transcript on our website

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