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I’m excited to announce the newest member of the Community Management Department, Spevacus! He will be joining Hoid, JNat, and Sasha on the Community Engagement and Enablement team, reporting to me. And in fulfillment of Prashanth’s commitment during the all-community AMA earlier this year, we’re especially excited to introduce a member coming directly from the community here on Meta to add another moderator’s perspective to the team.

Spevacus joins us with a background that blends over eight years of software development experience with deep roots here on Meta Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow. He’s leveraged this background over the years to create several userscripts to benefit his fellow curators, and spent a significant portion of his time contributing to Charcoal’s anti-spam efforts across the network. Spevacus has spent a lot of time in his engineering roles speaking directly to clients and distilling action items from their feedback. This combination of customer-facing work, technical expertise, and firsthand knowledge of what Meta’s all about makes him extremely well-suited to take on a Community Manager role.

As a Senior Community Manager on the Community Engagement & Enablement team, Spevacus will be focusing on empowering the network’s moderators, coordinating elections, and giving community-based feedback to our product and development teams. He will also be working closely with our dedicated Moderation Tooling team to improve the experience of mods across the network. Who better than a former moderator to have a voice there?

When he’s not roaming the halls of Meta, Spevacus enjoys playing video games, table-top RPGs, and doing his best to become more well-read. He recently traveled to the Greek islands and really enjoyed the experience, so he’s looking to continue traveling more in the future.

Please note that Spevacus is required by policy to resign his community issued mod tools, but he’s getting a shiny new staff badge in return. We will name a replacement moderator to fill his seat shortly.

Please help us all give him a warm welcome, and feel free to say “Hello!” to him around the network and in chat.

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    He's the first community manager hired from the community on purely that since Cat (V2blast was a CM elsewhere) - is there an intention to continue prioritising hiring from the community for some openings in future? Commented Sep 17 at 13:38
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    @JourneymanGeek Slate was also hired from the Community and not a CM at a different company. For future roles we are interested in looking at both community members as well as seasoned community managers who have expertise in the area we are hiring for. Commented Sep 17 at 14:03
  • I was under the impression she'd gotten in earlier. Which I guess is a little of both. Commented Sep 17 at 14:16
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    OK, this explains why Bad Stack Overflow Reviews room is now frozen ;) Congratulations Spevacus! Commented Sep 17 at 14:42

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Okay, here you go: 1 warm welcome. Or is it more 1 cold goodbye? Anyways, congrats Spevacus, you deserve it. It was fun modding this site with you, however short (just over a year, really!) it may have lasted.

See you!

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    Leaned on you a lot when I was learning the ropes here (I'm still not confident using the Redact button, I'll be honest). Thanks so much for the kind words <3 Commented Sep 17 at 13:27
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    The Redact button will always be mine (I'm good with it, I think? :P). You can pry that one from my cold, dead wings. If you ever need someone to press it, you know where to find me ;-) Commented Sep 17 at 13:28
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Congratulations, well deserved! When you joined the Meta moderator team, I was amazed how fast you picked up, even with no prior ♦ experience. A natural talent, so I'm not surprised the company decided they needed you in the Community Team. You survived being the only non-Dutch person in a moderator team and I'm sure you'll rock this as well!

P.S. at this moment, you only have mod labels here and on Stack Overflow, though you do have a staff label on all sites. Is that caching or did somebody forget to flip a couple of bits?

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    Thanks so much Glorfindel! For the rest of y'all, you should know that the Meta Mod Room is full of discussion on Dutch cuisine (alright it's actually mostly stroopwafels), and I did try some recently. They were delicious. Commented Sep 17 at 14:00
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    As to the network-wide mod status, devs are currently turning the knobs. Give them 6 to 8... Commented Sep 17 at 14:02
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    Technically I was non dutch :D Commented Sep 17 at 14:16
  • @JourneymanGeek didn't Spevacus and rene join the team after you left? Commented Sep 17 at 14:22
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    @Glorfindel We still had ChrisF back then ;-) He's only been the only non-Dutch one for a few months. That's a very minimal trial :P Commented Sep 17 at 14:28
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    Yup but I was still a mod, twice. If SE won my trust, maybe again, but seems I'm not quite ready to help fight their dumpsterfires yet. Commented Sep 17 at 14:29
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These are the best posts. Spevacus, welcome to the team! We have high hopes for you, and can't wait to point you toward the pile of work that needs doing.

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    The answers are welcoming and favorable because he's a (former) well known user, and has not annoyed a bunch of people. Occasionally drawing people from the user base is a good move, along with recruiting people from the top schools (for some of the more technical challenges). Commented Sep 21 at 12:28
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Congratulations, Spevacus.

I've been nothing but impressed with your behavior and interactions in your time on the network. Your first diamond being here on Meta is rather unusual in the SE world, and yet that's the community that you stood out and excelled in, very quickly making use of skills that other community members take years to hone. There's a reason you were on my personal shortlist of community members that I would like to see hired, that I was asked to compile before the opening was announced. I'm hard pressed to think of someone I would prefer to see in this role.

We've been in contact throughout the entire process of you being hired as well as beforehand, and you still know where to find me. I'm looking forward to seeing you get to work, and to working together to continue to repair, improve, and further develop the community and the network.

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    The respect is mutual, Mithical. I have a deep appreciation for everything you've done for this network and for me personally. If I can ask you for yet another favor, it'd be to continue to be the voice we need to hear precisely when you think we need to hear it. For all the fun and unicorns, this is extremely important. Commented Sep 17 at 16:06
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    "coming directly from the community here on Meta" 👏🙌 welcome @Spevacus Commented Sep 27 at 9:22
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Welcome to Stack, Spevacus! We're excited about you joining our team at such an exciting and crucial moment in our company's trajectory. Looking forward to engaging with you!

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    Thanks for the warm welcome! Looking forward to helping steer the ship. :) Commented Sep 17 at 15:26
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I think I speak for a large part of the community when I say that this is very good news to hear.

Spevacus in particular is uniquely suited to this role as you noted, and I hope and expect his contributions to the network's community management to have a very positive impact, especially around the moderation tools given his Charcoal experience.

This is also a great signal from Stack Exchange, the company. You are showing us that you're ready to listen to the community in at least some capacity, and I hope this continues, because I believe this is the best way for both the community and the company to coexist in a healthy way.

Congratulations on finally getting paid to browse stack exchange at work =T

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Congrats, Spevacus! The team is lucky to have you and your vast knowledge of the community and the platform – and I'm happy to say you're joining a great Community team. I look forward to seeing what you bring to the team!

Two questions for you:

  • What's your favorite flavor of pie?
  • What's your favorite dinosaur?
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    Thank you very much! Fall's nearly upon us, so I'm definitely feeling some apple or pumpkin pie, with a preference towards apple. Cinnamon-y goodness sounds amazing right about now. As for a dinosaur, I'd go with pterodactyl because of how it's spelled and for no other reason. Commented Sep 17 at 19:08
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    @Spevacus: Um actually, pterosaurs aren't technically dinosaurs... 🤓 Commented Sep 19 at 1:43
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    ... We'll discuss this later. >:( Commented Sep 19 at 1:47
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Really great news! 🥳

Looking forward to pinging you when we need increased spam flags over in Charcoal :p

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    The spammers aren't gonna stand a chance, I promise. Give me 6-8... Commented Sep 17 at 15:57
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Nice one fella! You've always seemed to the a thoroughly nice guy and I suspect that you'll continue to be so now that you've been awarded the staff cape.

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Congrats! I'm very happy to see a new CM who is on the side of the community, with a genuine goal of improving the site. This makes me feel a bit more hopeful for the future of SE.

I hope you enjoy being a CM!

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