People matter.

There's always been a few personalities that have had an outsized effect on a single community or the aggregate communities.

Some are fonts of knowledge on a specific obscure field - I talk to one of the old serverfault regulars when I need advice on 10gig networking or ZFS, or someone pokes at my weirder computer problems or generally a good general source of knowledge. Less of these conversations happen on Stack Exchange and SE chat, as these communities drifted away, but stuck together elsewhere. I've always been hopeful they'd return under the right conditions, though those conditions feel distant.

The needs of the many the "Millions of users" are often served by the knowledge of the few. Keeping and building those cores of expert users is essential. We've had a few brain drains over the years.

Other actually stumble into roles of community leadership. It took a lot of nagging to get me to stand to be a moderator back in the day, and despite the bigger community the folks with the ability are rare, and sometimes their willingness to step up is rarer when they hear horror stories or people they trust get treated less than well.

This is also true of broader communities and community management. The ability to attract talent and retain it, either as staff or as community folks as a force multiplier is affected by how the community - or in our sense our people are treated. I'd consider many of the community team, current or historic as well as folks elsewhere who put in the work as such. They're family In a sense.

Valuing and nurturing the folks, either in individual communities or in your team over time is essential. I didn't feel up to moderating super user till 4-5 years in the community, and ... that's less time than the average CM seems to have in the community. The selection of who gets downsized doesn't quite help this. They have... seemingly made the most damaging choices possible, even when there's no such thing as a 'good' choice here.

Communities need stability. They need people they can trust and work with. Communities also lose trust quickly and generally it takes too long to resolve a crisis with the structure we have now. Its been the case for quite a while. We've a shaky edifice, with bricks constantly being pinched for someone's dream castle.

We've generally not had more than a few years of stability. We go from one crisis to another, with what feels like a growing gap between what the company wants and can achieve, and what we want and what we get.

We need our pillars (which seem the first things to go) in these storms, and folks who're willing to build those ties retained. I'd love to see a place where my communities in exile return, and I feel the contributions of those of ours are valued, and the people we consider within as parts of the community grow, both as people, and in numbers.

People matter. We'd love to see that understood.

People matter.

There's always been a few personalities that have had an outsized effect on a single community or the aggregate communities.

Some are fonts of knowledge on a specific obscure field - I talk to one of the old Server Fault regulars when I need advice on 10 GigE networking or ZFS, or someone pokes at my weirder computer problems or generally a good general source of knowledge. Fewer of these conversations happen on Stack Exchange and SE chat, as these communities drifted away, but stuck together elsewhere. I've always been hopeful they'd return under the right conditions, though those conditions feel distant.

The needs of the many the "Millions of users" are often served by the knowledge of the few. Keeping and building those cores of expert users is essential. We've had a few brain drains over the years.

Other actually stumble into roles of community leadership. It took a lot of nagging to get me to stand to be a moderator back in the day, and despite the bigger community the folks with the ability are rare, and sometimes their willingness to step up is rarer when they hear horror stories or people they trust get treated less than well.

This is also true of broader communities and community management. The ability to attract talent and retain it, either as staff or as community folks as a force multiplier is affected by how the community - or in our sense our people are treated. I'd consider many of the community team, current or historic as well as folks elsewhere who put in the work as such. They're family in a sense.

Valuing and nurturing the folks, either in individual communities or in your team over time is essential. I didn't feel up to moderating Super User till 4-5 years in the community, and ... that's less time than the average CM seems to have in the community. The selection of who gets downsized doesn't quite help this. They have... seemingly made the most damaging choices possible, even when there's no such thing as a 'good' choice here.

Communities need stability. They need people they can trust and work with. Communities also lose trust quickly and generally it takes too long to resolve a crisis with the structure we have now. It’s been the case for quite a while. We've a shaky edifice, with bricks constantly being pinched for someone's dream castle.

We've generally not had more than a few years of stability. We go from one crisis to another, with what feels like a growing gap between what the company wants and can achieve, and what we want and what we get.

We need our pillars (which seem the first things to go) in these storms, and folks who're willing to build those ties retained. I'd love to see a place where my communities in exile return, and I feel the contributions of those of ours are valued, and the people we consider within as parts of the community grow, both as people, and in numbers.

People matter. We'd love to see that understood.

People matter.

There's always been a few personalities that have had an outsized effect on a single community or the aggregate communities.

Some are fonts of knowledge on a specific obscure field - I talk to one of the old serverfault regulars when I need advice on 10gig networking or ZFS, or generally a good general source of knowledge - a specific top 10 user on super user comes to mind. The needs of the many the "Millions of users" are often served by the knowledge of the few. Keeping and building those cores of expert users is essential. We've had a few brain drains over the years.

Other actually stumble into roles of community leadership. It took a lot of nagging to get me to stand to be a moderator back in the day, and despite the bigger community the folks with the ability are rare, and sometimes their willingness to step up is rarer when they hear horror stories or people they trust get treated less than well.

This is also true of broader communities and community management. The ability to attract talent and retain it, either as staff or as community folks as a force multiplier is affected by how the community - or in our sense our people are treated. I'd consider many of the community team, current or historic as well as folks elsewhere who put in the work as such. They're family In a sense.

Valuing and nurturing the folks, either in individual communities or in your team over time is essential. I didn't feel up to moderating super user till 4-5 years in the community, and ... that's less time than the average CM seems to have in the community. The selection of who gets downsized doesn't quite help this. They have... seemingly made the most damaging choices possible, even when there's no such thing as a 'good' choice here.

Communities need stability. They need people they can trust and work with. Communities also lose trust quickly and generally it takes too long to resolve a crisis with the structure we have now. Its been the case for quite a while. We've a shaky edifice, with bricks constantly being pinched for someone's dream castle.

We've generally not had more than a few years of stability. We go from one crisis to another, with what feels like a growing gap between what the company wants and can achieve, and what we want and what we get.

We need our pillars (which seem the first things to go) in these storms, and folks who're willing to build those ties retained. I'd love to see a place where my communities in exile return, and I feel the contributions of those of ours are valued, and the people we consider within as parts of the community grow, both as people, and in numbers.

People matter. We'd love to see that understood.

People matter.

There's always been a few personalities that have had an outsized effect on a single community or the aggregate communities.

Some are fonts of knowledge on a specific obscure field - I talk to one of the old serverfault regulars when I need advice on 10gig networking or ZFS, or someone pokes at my weirder computer problems or generally a good general source of knowledge. Less of these conversations happen on Stack Exchange and SE chat, as these communities drifted away, but stuck together elsewhere. I've always been hopeful they'd return under the right conditions, though those conditions feel distant. 

The needs of the many the "Millions of users" are often served by the knowledge of the few. Keeping and building those cores of expert users is essential. We've had a few brain drains over the years.

Other actually stumble into roles of community leadership. It took a lot of nagging to get me to stand to be a moderator back in the day, and despite the bigger community the folks with the ability are rare, and sometimes their willingness to step up is rarer when they hear horror stories or people they trust get treated less than well.

This is also true of broader communities and community management. The ability to attract talent and retain it, either as staff or as community folks as a force multiplier is affected by how the community - or in our sense our people are treated. I'd consider many of the community team, current or historic as well as folks elsewhere who put in the work as such. They're family In a sense.

Valuing and nurturing the folks, either in individual communities or in your team over time is essential. I didn't feel up to moderating super user till 4-5 years in the community, and ... that's less time than the average CM seems to have in the community. The selection of who gets downsized doesn't quite help this. They have... seemingly made the most damaging choices possible, even when there's no such thing as a 'good' choice here.

Communities need stability. They need people they can trust and work with. Communities also lose trust quickly and generally it takes too long to resolve a crisis with the structure we have now. Its been the case for quite a while. We've a shaky edifice, with bricks constantly being pinched for someone's dream castle.

We've generally not had more than a few years of stability. We go from one crisis to another, with what feels like a growing gap between what the company wants and can achieve, and what we want and what we get.

We need our pillars (which seem the first things to go) in these storms, and folks who're willing to build those ties retained. I'd love to see a place where my communities in exile return, and I feel the contributions of those of ours are valued, and the people we consider within as parts of the community grow, both as people, and in numbers.

People matter. We'd love to see that understood.